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^THE 

CONSOLIDATED  RURAL 
SCHOOL  ^ 


EDITED   BY 

LOUIS  W.  RAPEER  ^ 
w 

PRESIDENT,   RESEARCH  UNIVERSITY 

PRESIDENT,   FEDERATION   FOR   AMERICAN  CHILDHOOD 

WASHINGTON,  D.  C. 


ILLUSTRATED 


CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S   SONS 

NEW  YORK  CHICAGO  BOSTON 


Mai. 


Copyright,  1920,  by 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


^. 


^i^^((3 


PREFACE 

The  value  of  co-operation  in  place  of  individualism  is 
rapidly  rising  in  the  consciousness  of  the  American  people. 
For  many  reasons  we  are  far  more  closely  related  to  more 
people  of  the  world  than  formerly  and  are  more  conscious  of 
the  relationship.  This  expansion  of  personality  is  ready 
to-day  to  conceive  and  to  realize  feelingly  the  brotherhood 
of  man  and  both  national  and  world  citizenship.  The  ad- 
joining farms  or  nearest  small  villages  do  not  circumscribe 
the  breadth  of  our  interests,  acquaintance,  nor  economic 
exchange.  To-day  we  think  more  in  terms  of  the  county, 
the  State,  the  nation,  and  the  world,  instead  of  provincially 
limiting  ourselves  to  the  farm  and  the  little  one-room  school 
district. 

The  automobile,  telephone,  good  roads,  trolley  cars,  news- 
papers, magazines,  and  larger  administrative  participation 
tend  greatly  to  widen  the  area  of  our  social  connections. 
The  stupendous  world  war  with  its  unprecedented  stimulus 
to  close  national  organization  of  railroads,  agriculture,  and 
manufacturing,  with  all  their  implications  of  sacrificing  indi- 
vidualism to  social  efficiency,  has  sent  the  world,  and  espe- 
cially America,  a  long  way  toward  a  desirable  organization 
of.  all  of  each  nation's  forces.  The  consolidated  rural  school 
is  part  and  partner  of  this  broader  socialization  and  integra- 
tion. It  stands  for  educational  efficiency  in  the  interests  of 
the  nation  and  humanity  by  means  of  a  greater  degree  of 
co-operation  and  organization  over  a  wider  area  of  territory. 

Already  thousands  of  such  schools  have  displaced  the 
little  one-room  structures  of  restricted  neighborhoods  and 
mental  outlooks  from  sea  to  sea.     Every  State  has  done 


IV  PREFACE 

something  to  develop  such  schools  and  a  considerable  body 
of  literature  has  appeared  in  the  form  of  reports,  magazine 
accounts,  and  isolated  chapters  in  books,  describing  more  or 
less  accurately  this  new  and  important  type  of  educational 
advancement.  Along  with  the  larger,  graded  school,  taking 
the  place  of  as  many  as  ten  or  more  single-room  schools  of 
the  pioneer  type  with  transportation  of  pupils  for  long,  dis- 
tances, frequently  five  or  more  miles  from  all  directions,  we 
find  developing  also  at  the  consolidated-school  centre  such 
strategic  factors  as  a  school  farm,  a  home  for  the  principal 
teacher  and  his  family,  homes  for  other  teachers  and  janitor 
on  the  school  property,  the  integration  of  the  village  trading 
centre  and  farms,  an  increased  use  of  the  school  as  a  com- 
munity centre,  especially  where  a  good  auditorium  is  pro- 
vided, and  a  very  much  closer  adaptation  of  the  work  of  the 
school  to  definitely  social  and  particularly  rural  needs. 

These  remarkable  transformations  are  worthy  of  the 
closest  study,  interpretation,  and  publicity.  Isolated  reports, 
surveys,  and  single  chapters  fail  to  do  justice  to  the  theme 
and  fail  also  in  acquainting  many  people  with  this  type  of 
solution  of  the  great  rural-school  problem.  We  greatly  need 
a  first-class,  thoroughgoing  book,  based  on  investigation, 
nation-wide  acquaintance  with  this  type  of  School,  and  thor- 
oughly and  cautiously  worked  out  and  illustrated.  Such  a 
volume  few  busy  educators  have  time  to  produce.  Feeling 
the  need,  however,  the  editor  has  done  his  best  in  producing 
such  a  volume  by  the  method  of  co-operation  of  specialists 
found  successful  in  other  volumes  of  this  series.  We  do  not 
hesitate  to  pioneer  and  open  up  the  way  for  more  thorough- 
going works  in  the  future.  Our  purpose  is  practical,  directed 
to  immediate  and  wide  publicity  of  a  very  worthy  hypothesis 
for  the  solution  of  a  very  grave  problem,  how  to  secure  better 
rural  education  in  this  democracy. 

The  volume  is  based  on  rather  definite  aims  of  education 
and  on  a  social  theory  of  the  function  of  the  rural  public 
school.    The  general  aim  held  is  that  of  social  efficiency 


PREFACE  V 

while  the  subordinate  aims  under  which  may  be  grouped  the 
principal  needs  of  country  people  and  the  principal  problems 
of  life  which  they  solve  well  or  ill  somewhat  according  to  the 
nature  of  the  schooling  which  they  receive  are  analyzed  as: 
(i)  Vital  efficiency,  (2)  vocational  efficiency,  (3)  avocational 
efficiency,  (4)  civic  efficiency,  and  (5)  moral  efficiency.  These 
are  the  fundamental  goals  of  each  chapter  and  are  treated 
explicitly  in  the  chapters  on  the  programme  of  studies.  If 
the  principal  problems  of  life  lie  in  these  fields  then  it  is  the 
business  of  education  to  make  minimal  essentials  those  school 
activities  which  produce  efficiency  in  solving  them.  How 
children  may  be  changed  physically  and  mentally  by  suitable 
methods  to  secure  these  five  efficiencies  of  character  is  treated 
briefly  in  two  chapters  on  the  learning  and  teaching  processes. 

We  have  selected  a  few  of  the  leading  specialists  and  suc- 
cessful workers  in  this  field  to  help  in  the  production  of  a 
first  volume  on  the  consolidated  rural  school.  This  method 
of  co-operation  needs  no  defense.  It  has  long  been  success- 
fully used  by  the  medical  profession  and  others,  and  has 
demonstrated  its  utility  in  education  by  a  number  of  good 
books,  among  which  we  may  mention  the  volumes  by  Pro- 
fessor Paul  Monroe  and  the  lamented  Professor  Charles 
Hughes  Johnston,  and  our  own  "Educational  Hygiene"  and 
''Teaching  Elementary  School  Subjects."  Another  volume 
written  by  the  editor  alone,  on  ''Rural  School  Hygiene," 
will  in  part  also  treat  of  the  consoUdated  school. 

The  editor  here  expresses  his  warm  appreciation  for  the 
assistance  of  the  contributors,  of  the  many  who  have  fur- 
nished photographs  and  data  from  personal  experiences,  of 
Doctor  Harold  W.  Foght  while  in  the  United  States  Bureau 
of  Education,  and  of  his  wife,  Frances  Chandler  Rapeer. 

L.  W.  R. 

Washington,  D.  C,  January,  1920. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGB 

I.    National  and  Rural  Consolidation     ....        i 

By  Louis  W,  Rapeer,  M.A.,  Ph.D.,  Director,  National  School  of  So- 
cial Research,  and  President  of  Federation  for  American  Childhood, 
Washington,  D .  C .  Author  of ' '  School  Health  Administration, ' ' ' '  The 
Administration  of  School  Medical  Inspection,"  Coauthor  and  Editor 
of  "Educational  Hygiene,"  "Teaching  Elementary  School  Subjects," 
and  "How  to  Teach  the  Elementary  School  Subjects";  Associate 
Editor  of  American  Education  and  of  the  American  Journal  of  School 
Hygiene. 

II.    The  American  Rural  School 21 

By  Philander  P.  Claxton,  Litt.D.,  LL.D.,  United  States  Commis- 
sioner of  Education,  Washington,  D.  C.  Joint  Author  of  "Effective 
English"  and  of  numerous  government  reports. 


III.    Community  Organization  and  Consolidation  . 

By  Warren  H.  Wilson,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of  Rural  Education,  Teachers 
College,  Columbia  University,  New  York  City. 


.  V 


IV.    Rural  Economics  and  Consolidation    ....      66    ( — 

By  T.  N.  Carver,  Ph.D.,  Professor  of  Economics,  Harvard  University, 
Cambridge,  Mass.  Author  of  "Rural  Economics"  and  "Readings 
in  Riural  Economics." 

V.    School  Administration  and  Consolidation      .     .      91     L- 

By  the  Editor. 

VI.    The  Growth  of  Consolidation 108 

By  Major  A.  C.  Monahan,  B.S.,  Sometime  Specialist  in  Rural  Educa- 
tion, United  States  Bureau  of  Education,  Assistant  Director  of  Re- 
construction in  Hospitals,  United  States  Army,  Washington,  D.  C. 
Author  of  numerous  government  bulletins  such  as  "The  Consolidation 
of  Rural  Schools"  and  "Transportation  of  Pupils  at  Public  Expense." 
vii 


Vlll  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PACK 

VII.    A  Visit  to  a  Consolidated  School       ....     130 

By  Katherine  M.  Cook,  Specialist  in  Rural  Education,  United  States 
Bureau  of  Education,  Washington,  D,  C.  Formerly  State  Superin- 
tendent of  Public  Instruction  of  Colorado.  Author  and  Coauthor  of 
numerous  government  bulletins  such  as  "Rural  School  Supervision 
in  the  United  States,"  "Surveys  of  the  school  systems  of  Alabama, 
Colorado,  Wyoming,"  and  "A  Manual  of  Educational  Legislation." 

^      VIII.    The  Consolidated-School  Site  and  Its  Use     .     149 

By  A.  C.  MoNAHAN  and  the  Editor. 

IX.    The  Consolidated-School  Building    ....     166 

By  the  Editor. 

X.    The  Teacherage 190 

By  the  Editor. 

XI.    Transportation  of  Pupils  at  Public  Expense  .     208 

By  A.  C.  MONAHAN. 

iy^    XII.    Methods  and  Facts  of  Consolidation     .     .     .     239 

By  W.  S.  FoGARTV,  County  Superintendent  of  Preble  County,  Ohio, 
Lee  F.  Driver,  County  Superintendent  of  Randolph  County, 
Indiana,  A.  C.  Fuller,  Jr.,  State  Inspector  of  Rural  Schools 
of  Iowa,  A.  M.  Merrill,  Principal,  Jordan  High  School,  Sandy, 
Utah,  C.  G.  Sargent,  Professor  of  Education,  Colorado  Agricul- 
tural College,  Fort  CoUins,  Colorado,  and  Superintendent  C.  H. 
Skidmore,  Granite  School  District,  Salt  Lake  County,  Utah. 

XIII.  The  Curriculum  of  the  Consolidated  School.     284 

By  the  Editor. 

XIV.  The  Curriculum  of  the  Consolidated   School 

(Continued) 301 

By  the  Editor. 

1/       XV.    Rural-Life  Needs  and  College-Entrance  De- 
mands     317 

By  the  Editor. 

XVI.    The  Outside  of  the  Cup— Relative  Values  in 

English  Instruction 344 

By  the  Editor. 


CONTENTS  IX 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

XVII.  Learning  Processes  of  Country  Children  .     .     364 

By  the  Editor. 

XVIII.  The   Teaching  Process  in  the   Consolidated 

School 392 

By  the  Editor. 

XIX.    The    Country    Girl    and    the    Consolidated 

School 425 

By  Katherine  M.  Cook. 

XX.    Rural  Recreation  and  Consolidation  .     .     .    444 

By  the  Editor. 

XXI.    The  Difficulties  of  Consolidation  .     .     .     .     475 

By  L.  J.  Hanifan,  M.A.,  State  Supervisor  of  Rural  Schools,  Charles- 
town,  West  Virginia.  Author  of  "Social  and  Community  Ac- 
tivities." 

XXII.    The  New  Consolidated  School 497     ^ 

By  the  Editor. 


Bibliography  on  Consolidation 520 

Index 543 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

A  corn  project — Instruction  in  cultivation,  Virginia Frontispiece 

FACING  PAGE 

Country  boys  at  practical  work 12 

Building  a  silo.    A  project  in  farm  mechanics  in  Minnesota 12 

A  nineteenth-century  school  and  twentieth-century  fanning  implements 

side  by  side 24 

A  brooder  and  laying  house,  Berks  County,  Pa .  40 

Poultry  club  work  of  Pennsylvania  State  College 40 

A  home-made  brooder 40 

Cast  of  "Midsummer  Night's  Dream"  as  presented  by  the  school  children 

of  Rockingham,  N.  C 60 

A  school  assembly  room 60 

Learning  how  to  prune  an  orchard 76 

An  orchard  project 76 

Animal-husbandry  study  at  first-hand 84 

Pupils  studying  tree  grafting  at  Sherrard,  West  Virginia 84 

Studying  alfalfa  at  first-hand 98 

Learning  to  judge  cattle  in  club  work 98 

A  home  project  with  seed  com 98 

A  Wyoming  consolidated  school 114 

A  type  of  many  abandoned  pioneer  schools 114 

A  consolidated  school,  Woodstown,  N.  J 118 

From  five  to  twenty  such  structures  may  be  eliminated  by  one  consoli- 
dated school 118 

The  Colorado  school  visited  by  Mrs.  Cook 134 

zi 


XU  ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING  PAGE 

A  movable  partition  for  auditorium  use,  Cache  La  Poudre  school    ...  134 

Girls  gaining  domestic  eflficiency 142 

Practical  sewing  for  Colorado  girls 142 

A  model  bam  in  North  Carolina 152 

A  model  bam  at  a  country-life  school 152 

Play  at  a  consolidated  school,  Preble  County,  Ohio 158 

Supervised  play  at  a  consolidated  school  in  Marion  County,  Ohio    ...  158 

A  one-story  building  erected  at  Aberdeen,  Washington 174 

An  attractive  building  and  site 184 

A  neat  example  of  the  two-story  type  with  basement 184 

A  modest  teacherage  in  West  Virginia 204 

A  good  bam  for  horses,  vans,  bicycles,  auto-busses,  and  other  vehicles, 

Preble  County,  Ohio 218 

Ten  in  a  row  ready  for  the  home  trip,  Preble  County,  Ohio 218 

A  start  toward  farm  carpentry 248 

Bird  houses  constructed  in  Preble  County  Schools,  Ohio 248 

Agriculture  is  the  central  subject  in  rural  education 294 

A  class  in  botany  at  a  summer  school 294 

Members  of  the  Boys'  Com  Club  with  agent  explaining  the  root  system, 

Alabama 298 

A  school  agricultural  exhibit  in  the  Philippines 298 

A  domestic  arts  exhibit 308 

A  day  of  recreation  in  the  mountains 308 

Grading  and  testing  com  in  a  school  laboratory,  West  Virginia 320 

A  class  in  soil  study  in  Wisconsin 320 

Farm  mechanical  drawing  in  a  Maryland  school 320 

The  library  wagon  of  Washington  County,  Maryland,  stopping  at  a  farm- 
house    356 

A  well  used  library  room 35^ 

A  small  printing  outfit  is  a  great  help  in  English  and  m  community  spirit  362 


ILLUSTRATIONS  Xlll 

PACING  PAGE 

Pig-club  work  in  Pennsylvania 372 

Stud)dng  a  milking-machine     372 

A  lesson  on  the  horse 372 

Teachers  learning  vegetable  gardening  at  a  summer  school 398 

Giving  the  girls  a  chance  at  West  Alexandria,  Ohio 398 

Outdoor  group  games  for  girls  at  the  Cache  La  Poudre  consolidated  school  434 

A  canning-club  girl,  Oregon 434 

A  garden  project  by  Girl  Scouts 440 

A  field  day  in  Preble  County,  Ohio 460 

Junior  orchestra,  ages  6  to  12 470 

Vital  efl&ciency  through  physical  education  is  emphasized  in  all  Philippine 

schools 470 

Students  in  costumes  for  a  play  which  they  produced  in  connection  with 

their  graduation  exercises,  Manila,  P.  1 492 

Float  representing  the  San  Andres  primary  school  in  the  floral  parade, 

Philippine  carnival,  Manila,  1915 493 


THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL 
SCHOOL 

CHAPTER  I 
NATIONAL  AND   RURAL  CONSOLIDATION 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  have  been  some  of  the  principal  effects  on  democracy  of 

the  Great  War? 

2.  What  is  a  democracy  and  in  what  ways  is  it  superior  to  autocracy? 

3.  What  are  some  of  the  principal  weaknesses  of  our  democracy? 

4.  In  what  ways  can  public  schools  promote  the  best  democracy? 

5.  What  are  the  relative  advantages  and  disadvantages  of  rural  and 

urban  life  ?   " 

6.  What  are  some  of  the  principal  problems  and  needs  of  country 

people  as  you  know  them?    Classify  these  needs  under  the  fol- 
lowing headings: 
(i)  Health  and  physical-development  needs. 

(2)  Economic  and  vocational  needs. 

(3)  Recreational  and  avocational  needs. 

(4)  Civic  and  co-operative  needs. 

(5)  Moral  and  religious  needs. 

7.  In  what  ways  do  the  single-room  schools  help  and  fail  to  help  sig- 

nificantly in  the  solution  of  the  above  rural-life  problems? 

8.  What  is  your  present  conception  of  a  consolidated  school?     On 

what  is  this  conception  based? 

9.  What  is  the  best  type  of  consoHdated  school  of  which  you  have 

knowledge  ? 
10.  To  the  solution  and  satisfaction  of  which  of  the  above  rural-life 
problems  and  needs  might  a  first-class  consolidated  school  be 
expected  to  contribute? 

I.    The  Present  Rapid  Increase  of  Social  Integration 

National  Consolidation. — The  World  War  has  worked 
unprecedented  transformations  in  the  organization  of  Ameri- 
can  life.     Individualism   and  competition   were  the  great 


2  tflE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

economic  and  civic  watchwords  of  the  period  before.  Hu- 
man brotherhood,  universal  democracy,  world  citizenship,  a 
league  of  nations,  and  co-operation  for  social  efficiency  are 
the  watchwords  to-day.  We  have  witnessed  the  interesting 
social  anomaly  of  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States 
prosecuting  and  fining  corporations  for  co-operation  and 
integration  on  a  large  scale  and  at  the  same  time  arranging 
with  the  individual  members  of  the  corporations  for  a  greater 
and  stronger  co-operative  organization  and  a  more  rigorous 
setting  of  prices  than  ever.  The  old  Antitrust  Sherman  Law, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  the  organization  of  all  the  railroads  of 
the  country  under  a  single  government  head,  on  the  other, 
represent  the  rapid  and  inevitable  change  of  view-point. 
The  war  has  done  for  us  in  a  few  years  what  perhaps  a 
century  would  not  have  accomplished  in  making  us  a  united, 
organized,  purposeful,  and  efficient  nation.^ 

A  tremendous  centralization  of  government  has  sudden- 
ly taken  place,  never  to  decentralize  to  our  former  status. 
Our  young  men  have  been  taken  from  their  homes,  their 
factories,  and  their  farms,  and  have  been  sent  by  the  hun- 
dred thousand  to  Europe  *'to  make  the  world  safe  for  de- 
mocracy"; the  government  has  taken  over  many  entire 
industries,  nation-wide  in  scope,  such  as  the  railroads  men- 
tioned, and  has  integrated  and  ruled  them  as  a  unit  and 
with  a  firm  hand;  prices  have  been  set  for  all  the  principal 
commodities;  and  both  production  and  consumption  have 
been  interfered  with  and  regulated  in  the  interest  of  national 
welfare  to  an  extent  formerly  deemed  utterly  impossible  ex- 
cept in  a  socialistic  state.  As  the  federal  government  has 
become  entirely  dominant  and  masterful  in  the  nation,  so, 
too,  the  individual  State  governments  have  drawn  to  them- 
selves extensive  powers  formerly  thought  to  be  the  posses- 

1  See  address  by  the  late  President  Charles  R.  Van  Hise  on  "  Some  Eco- 
nomic Aspects  of  the  World  War,"  as  published  in  Science  for  January  4  and 
II,  1918,  and  his  "Conservation  and  Regulation  in  the  United  States  During 
the  World  War,"  published  by  the  Food  Administration,  Washington,  D.  C. 


NATIONAL  AND  RURAL  CONSOLIDATION  3 

sion  of  smaller  governmental  units  or  of  individuals  them- 
selves. The  nation  and  each  unit  of  the  nation,  be  it  State, 
county,  or  township,  has  become  to  a  large  extent  a  mighty 
organized  team  of  workers  with  a  single  purpose  doing  a 
great  piece  of  work.  Individuals  joining  such  co-operative 
groups  both  lose  and  gain  by  the  process.  Usually  they  gain 
far  more  than  they  lose.  In  a  democracy  a  fine  balance  be- 
tween the  individual  and  the  state  is  maintained  and  its 
government  ever  comes  from  the  consent  and  co-operation 
of  the  governed. 

Becoming  part  of  a  great  organization  necessitates  a 
knowledge  of  the  whole  co-operative  enterprise  and  the  part 
each  plays  in  it;  it  necessitates  trained  habits  of  working  co- 
operatively with  broadened  views  and  purposes;  it  requires 
of  all  that  they  use  their  initiative,  originality,  and  energy 
for  the  promotion  of  the  ideals  and  aspirations  of  the  group. 
In  such  a  world,  with  all  the  new  and  mighty  engines  and 
instruments  of  transportation  and  communication  available, 
the  social  horizon  of  each  person  necessarily  must  be  very 
much  broader  than  in  the  days  when  the  members  of  a 
family  were  practically  all-sufficing,  producing  and  consum- 
ing all  they  needed,  and  finding  little  stimulus  to  wide  ac- 
quaintance and  social  give-and-take.  Then  the  world  was 
vast  and  unknown,  as  in  the  time  of  Columbus  and  later,  to 
the  provincial  individualists  on  the  little  farm  living  unto 
themselves.  To-day  the  world  is  rapidly  becoming  smaller 
and  nearer  to  us  all  and  it  may  safely  be  affirmed  that  a  large 
county,  with  its  good  roads,  telephones,  newspapers,  rural 
delivery,  larger  market,  varied  interchange  of  products  and 
specialization  of  labor  even  in  farming,  and  better  schools 
with  their  wider  view  is,  for  all  practical  purposes,  much 
smaller  to-day  than  was  a  township  forty  years  ago.  In 
fact,  for  many  thousands  of  people,  a  state  with  its  many 
counties  is  better  and  more  intimately  known  than  was 
the  township  for  the  same  number  a  few  generations  back. 
The  journey  of  a  family  of  children  to  a  consolidated  rural 


4  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

school  five  miles  away  in  a  school-owned  and  controlled 
auto-bus  or  school-hack  may  be  less  of  a  journey  with  far 
less  hardship  and  exposure  and  with  possibility  of  far  better 
attendance  than  the  tramp  through  snow  and  mud,  or  even 
over  good  roads,  to  the  single-room  "district"  school  of  the 
days  gone  by.  As  personahty  grows  large  and  social  the 
boundaries  of  the  world  recede  until  we  become  citizens  of 
the  little  community  of  the  world.  Not  to  feel  this  close- 
ness and  kinship  argues  our  own  limited  social  develop- 
ment. 

The  City's  Advantage. — The  chief  point  of  vigorous 
growth  and  development  in  the  United  States  has,  however, 
been  not  in  the  country  but  in  the  cities.  It  is  in  the  cities 
in  the  last  fifty  years  that  we  have  seen  most  of  the  decided 
inventions  and  improvements  in  living.  The  best  brains  and 
brawn  of  the  country  have  flown  thither  several  hundred 
thousand  strong  each  year.  Arriving  there  these  persons, 
naturally  individuahstic  by  farm-training  and  isolation,  have 
at  first  worked  for  themselves  or  at  most  for  the  city  at  the 
expense  of  the  country.  Here  practically  all  the  noteworthy 
developments  in  government,  in  sanitation,  in  association,  in 
recreation,  in  business,  and  in  education  have  taken  place. 
The  city  has  steadily  beaten  the  country  in  competition. 
The  schools  of  the  city  have  been  the  marvel  of  the  rural 
regions,  and  one  of  the  chief  reasons  of  many  people  for 
"leaving  the  farm"  has  been  to  obtain  the  advantages  of  the 
superior  city  schools.  As  a  consequence  of  so  many  absentee 
landlords  of  farms,  we  have  the  grave  evil  of  wide-spread  and 
rapidly  increasing  farm  tenantry,  the  "renters."  Strange 
as  it  may  seem,  city  life  has  been  made  more  attractive 
for  millions  than  country  life.  Even  in  health,  the  great  city 
of  New  York  has  surpassed  the  rest  of  the  State  with  a 
lower  death-rate.  The  city  has  procured  this  attractiveness 
by  being  open-minded,  social,  progressive,  co-operative, 
alert  and  inventive.  The  country  has  stood  still  or  moved 
more  slowly  because  of  the  opposite  of  such  qualities. 


NATIONAL  AND  RURAL  CONSOLIDATION  5 

In  the  legislature,  in  the  business  deal,  in  enterprise,  and 
in  the  schools  the  city  has  achieved  a  marked  advantage 
over  the  country.  The  school  buildings  have  been  far  more 
sanitary  and  attractive;  the  courses  of  study  have  been 
more  closely  related  to  the  needs  of  life  and  more  meaningful 
to  the  pupils;  the  principal  additions  to  the  ordinary  school- 
ing have  nearly  all  been  made  in  the  city;  the  teachers  have 
been  much  better  trained,  better  paid,  and  have  stayed  in 
the  profession  in  many  more  instances  until  they  have 
learned  to  do  well  this  most  important  work  of  modern 
democratic  governments;  the  school  years  have  been  longer; 
attendance  of  pupils  has  been  more  punctual  and  regular; 
medical  supervision,  physical  education,  vocational  and 
domestic  education,  art  and  musical  education,  have  been 
made  regular  parts  of  the  school  activities.  The  teachers 
have  not  only  been  superior  and  more  permanent  but  they 
have  had  excellent  supervision  and  training,  both  before 
they  have  entered  the  schools  and  while  in  service — through 
principals,  supervisors,  and  superintendents.  The  leaders 
of  country  children  and  youth,  on  the  contrary,  have  been, 
for  the  most  part,  young  untrained  girls  who  have  never  seen 
superior  teaching  done,  have  never  learned  how  to  do  it, 
and  who  do  not  have  the  age  and  breadth  of  view,  nor  re- 
main in  the  work  long  enough  to  get  to  be  much  more  than 
"blind  leaders  of  the  blind/'  "The  rural  school  has  been  a 
little  house,  on  a  little  ground,  with  a  little  equipment,  where 
a  little  teacher  at  a  little  salary,  for  a  little  while,  teaches 
Httle  children  little  things."  Such  teachers,  who,  according 
to  Commissioner  Claxton's  figures  in  the  next  chapter,  are 
the  typical  teachers  of  the  nation's  rural  schools,  cannot  give 
pupils  a  wider  view  of  life  and  the  world  to-day  than  they 
themselves  possess.  If  their  horizon  does  not  extend  beyond 
the  adjoining  farms  the  horizons  of  the  children  will  not 
except  by  chance  extend  farther.  Such  teachers  necessarily 
create  ineffective  provincials  where  they  need  to  create 
socially  efficient  citizens  of  the  world. 


THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 


II.    The  Rural-Education  Problem  and  the 
Consolidation  Hypothesis 

The  Rural-Education  Problem. — Some  of  the  best  minds 
of  our  nation  and  others  have  wrestled  with  the  problem  of 
how  to  improve  rural  education.  The  problem  seems  to 
break  up  principally  into  the  following  analysis: 

1.  How  can  we  get  better  and  more  permanent  teachers? 

2.  How  can  we  get  better  and  more  needed  subject-matter? 

3.  How  can  we  get  better  and  more  supervision  and  administra- 
tion? 

4.  How  can  we  get  better  and  more  buildings  and  equipment? 

These  usually  resolve  themselves  into  the  problem: 
How  can  we  get  more  money  for  rural  schools  ?  and  its  cor- 
ollary, How  can  we  get  this  money  wisely  spent? 

The  consolidated  school  is  one  hypothesis,  or  tentative 
solution,  for  this  great  problem  of  how  to  secure  more  ef- 
fective rural  education  and  thus  a  higher  type  of  country 
life.  The  principal  suggested  solutions  are,  among  others, 
the  ten  following: 

1.  Strengthen  the  state  departments  of  public  education. 

2.  Provide  compulsory  laws  for  minimum  salaries,  terms,  attend- 
ance, etc. 

3.  Provide  new  sources  of  revenue  for  schools. 

4.  Provide  a  better  distribution  of  the  money  now  spent. 

5.  Strengthen  the  county  departments  of  education  in  various 
ways,  and  provide  for  the  county  unit  where  absent. 

6.  Provide  for  extensive  supervision  of  teachers  in  rural  schools. 

7.  Provide  consolidated  schools  in  place  of  the  many  single-room 
schools. 

8.  Provide  school-farms  and  a  better  living  for  the  principal 
teacher. 

9.  Provide  transportation  of  pupils  to  large  schools. 

10.  Provide  for  high-school,  normal-school,  and  other  professional 
training  for  rural  teachers. 


NATIONAL  AND  RURAL  CONSOLIDATION  7 

Many  different  solutions  in  actual  practice  as  schools  are 
to  be  found  scattered  over  the  United  States.^ 

Now  all  of  these  are  good.  Probably  all  are  necessary. 
We  can  get  fairly  good  schools  without  consolidation  and  its 
concomitants.  County  Superintendent  Cook  of  Baltimore 
County,  Maryland,  has  undoubtedly  obtained  fairly  good 
schools  without  consolidation,  through  extensive  and  pro- 
fessional supervision  and  a  number  of  the  other  nine  fac- 
tors. Consolidation  is  hard  to  secure  in  many  places  and  in 
some  spots  it  is  probably  undesirable.  We  should  like  to 
take  the  space  and  time  to  analyze  the  advantages  and  dis- 
advantages of  each  of  the  ten  typical  solutions  mentioned 
above  and  compare  them  with  the  aim  of  selecting  the  single 
solution  or  group  of  solutions  which  has  most  of  advantage 
and  least  of  disadvantages.  Before  proceeding  further  some 
definition  may  be  desirable. 

A  consolidated  rural  school  may  be  defined  tentatively 
as  a  school  produced  by  bringing  together  the  pupils  of  two 
or  more  single-room  or  othe^  schools  in  a  graded  school  of 
at  least  two  rooms  and  two  teachers  for  the  purpose  of  better 
educational  advantages.  It  is  of  various  types  and  increases 
in  excellence  as  it  adds  various  features.  Such  additions 
may  be  listed  as  follows: 

1.  Classrooms — from  two  to  many. 

2.  With  but  the  upper  grades  to  an  entire  elementary  school  and 
high  school. 

3.  From  no  assembly-room  and  study-hall  to  excellent  ones. 

4.  From  no  rooms  for  agriculture  and  household  arts  to  excellent 
ones. 

5.  From  no  laboratories  for  the  sciences  to  one  or  more  for  each. 

6.  From  no  lunch-room  to  an  excellent  one. 

7.  From  no  gymnasium,  shower-baths,  and  outdoor-play  appara- 
tus to  full  equipment. 

8.  From  outdoor  privies  to  best  modem  indoor  flush  toilets. 

» See  Monahan's  bulletin  of  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education  on  Consolida- 
tion and  Foght's  "The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work"  (Macmillan). 


8  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

9.  From  no  office  for  principal  or  teachers'  retiring-rooms  up  to 
the  best  for  both  sexes  and  an  excellent  office  with  waiting-room. 

10.  From  small  grounds  of  less  than  an  acre  up  to  a  site  with  fifty 
or  more. 

11.  From  no  transportation  of  pupils  up  to  the  best,  in  exhaust- 
heated,  glass-lighted  auto-vans. 

12.  From  no  teachers'  and  principal's  cottages,  or  teacherages,  up 
to  the  best. 

13.  From  no  experimental  and  demonstration  use  of  land  up  to 
best. 

14.  From  no  good  ruralized  course  of  study  up  to  the  best. 

15.  From  poor,  inexperienced,  inadequately  trained  teachers  up  to 
best  normal  and  college  graduates. 

The  list  might  easily  be  extended  as  a  class  exercise. 

The  first-class  consolidated  school,  serving  an  area  re- 
quiring pupils  to  be  en  route  either  way  no  longer  than  an 
hour  as  a  maximum  when  transported  at  public  expense, 
seems  to  combine  more  advantages  and  fewer  disadvantages 
than  any  other  solution,  covers  more  of  the  other  solutions, 
and  does  so  with  greater  economy  for  the  results  obtained 
than  any  other.  For  brevity,  we  list  below  some  of  its  chief 
advantages  and  disadvantages  which  might  easily  be  ex- 
tended, expanded,  and  discussed  at  length. 

ni.    Superior  Consolidation  and  Its  Advantages 

Some  Advantages  of  First-Class  Consolidation. — i.  It 
greatly  widens  the  acquaintance  groups  uniting  several 
small  or  partial  communities  into  one,  and  so  broadens  the 
individuals  socially,  and  meets  the  imperative  demand  for  a 
broadening  of  economic  and  social  co-operation.  Pupils 
who  go  to  school  together  from  an  area  ten  miles  or  more  in 
diameter  for  five  to  twelve  years,  through  elementary  and 
high  school  in  many  cases,  will  possess  in  adult  life  a  neigh- 
borhood much  larger  and  richer  in  its  relationships  than  the 
narrow  one  produced  by  the  one-room  school.  Where  this 
consolidated  area  is  a  natural,  economic,  racial,  transporta- 


NATIONAL  AND  RURAL  CONSOLIDATION  9 

tional,  and  distributional  unit,  as  it  should  be,  we  have  an 
area  as  large  as  a  Western  township  or  larger  developed  into 
a  neighborhood. 

2.  It  provides  inevitably  for  better  educational,  econom- 
ic, and  social  leadership.  The  larger  school  with  from  one 
to  several  hundred  pupils  must  be  placed  under  strong 
management  and  wise  leadership.  It  necessitates  from  the 
nature  of  the  case  a  man  or  woman  as  principal  teacher  and 
supervisor,  with  a  strong  personality  and  good  educational 
training.  As  soon  as  the  strategic  importance  of  this  post 
is  recognized,  there  will  be  the  inevitable  demand  that  the 
principal  give  his  entire  time,  winter  and  summer,  to  the 
school  and  the  community,  and  be  an  educational,  agricul- 
tural, and  social  leader.  This  immediately  involves  a  home 
for  the  principal  on  the  school  property  and  a  school-farm. 
The  free  use  of  the  teacherage  and  the  farm  will  add  some- 
thing to  what  should  be  a  good  money  salary,  not  less  than 
a  hundred  dollars  a  month,  twelve  months  in  the  year,  and 
thus  make  it  possible  to  obtain  and  retain  a  man  with  a 
family  who  has  been  trained  in  education,  agriculture,  rural 
economics  and  sociology,  and  in  the  elements  of  rural 
leadership,  a  man  with  at  least  a  bachelor's  degree  from  a 
good  agricultural  college.  Since  the  farm  and  teacherage 
can  be  purchased  at  once  or  through  bonds  at  the  time  the 
school  building  is  erected,  a  fair  share  of  the  principal's 
pay  has  been  provided  for  at  the  beginning  without  the 
usual  annual  financial  agony.  Under  the  one-room  system 
there  seems  to  be  no  way  by  which  a  sufficient  salary  for 
each  teacher  can  be  secured  when  paid  as  annual  or  monthly 
wages.  House-rent  and  the  free  use  of  the  farm  and  its 
products  may  soon  be  taken  as  a  matter  of  course,  to  which 
a  good  salary  is  to  be  added. 

3.  More  professional  teachers  subordinate  to  the  prin- 
cipal will  be  procured  and  developed.  Such  a  principal  will 
not  be  satisfied  with  young-girl  novices,  a  new  one  each  year, 
without  education,  experience,  training,  or  vision,  to  prac- 


lO  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

tise  on  the  children.  He  will  have  an  opportunity  to  con- 
vince the  school  board  of  the  economy  of  superior  teachers 
at  any  salary  necessary  to  obtain  them.  His  graded  school 
with  its  better  division  of  labor  and  opportunity  for  special- 
ization by  the  department  plan,  each  teacher  teaching  a  few 
instead  of  many  subjects,  the  contingent  opportunity, 
growing  out  of  the  nature  of  the  situation,  of  living  at  a 
good  boarding-place  in  a  house  also  erected  on  the  school 
property  for  the  use  of  the  unmarried  women  teachers,  and 
perhaps  another  for  the  single  men  teachers,  the  better 
social  opportunities  for  recreation  and  association,  and  the 
fine  opportunity  to  observe  some  good  teaching  and  to  get 
frequent  and  professional  supervision  and  help  in  becoming 
a  better  teacher — these  advantages  add  greatly  to  the  value 
of  the  position  for  a  teacher;  and  for  seven  to  twelve  hundred 
dollars  a  year  real  country-minded  teachers  can  frequently 
be  secured  as  able  as  those  in  cities  obtaining  larger  annual 
salaries,  although  the  consolidated  school  must  usually  equal 
at  least  the  city  salary  and  the  attractions  there. 

The  one-room  school  has  been  entirely  unable  to  procure 
such  teachers.  Every  consolidated-school  teacher  can  be  a 
normal-school  graduate  and  equipped  perhaps  with  a  year 
or  more  of  experience  in  a  one-room  school  and  in  many  cases 
with  some  college  work.  Weekly  teachers'  meetings,  read- 
ing circles,  a  good  school  library,  the  presence  of  high-school 
teachers  in  the  same  building,  the  constant  study  of  com- 
munity and  general  social  needs,  and  the  interest  and  free- 
dom obtained  by  a  new  type  of  school  for  adjusting  the 
school  to  both  the  nature  of  children  and  society,  will  all 
prove  stimuli  to  growth  not  available  in  a  smaller  school 
with  an  isolated  teacher  and  children  of  all  ages  in  all 
grades.  That  first-class  consolidated  schools  (not  "cheap 
imitations  of  the  real  thing")  can  secure  such  teachers  the 
statistics  from  many  States,  as  indicated  in  succeeding  chap- 
ters, show.  Break  the  ice  of  tradition  with  such  a  school 
and  people  somehow  release  the  grip  on  their  purses  and  are 


NATIONAL  AND  RURAL  CONSOLIDATION  II 

more  ready  to  purchase  a  genuine  rural  education  for  their 
children. 

4.  As  suggested,  high-school  provisions  may  usually  come 
at  the  beginning  or  develop  with  such  a  school.  The  larger 
area,  the  better  attendance,  the  increased  number  of  pupils 
passing  through  the  grades,  the  better  opportunity  to  give 
publicity  to  the  desirability  of  secondary  education,  and 
the  greater  interest  and  stimulus  coming  from  numbers, 
lead  inevitably  under  good  leadership  to  a  vigorous  high 
school  closely  adapted  to  community  welfare.  That  con- 
solidation actually  secures  high  schools  and  a  vastly  increased 
high-school  attendance  over  the  one-room-school  plan  has 
been  amply  demonstrated  by  reliable  statistics.  We  be- 
lieve that  such  a  school  is  preferable  to  a  county  high  school 
with  dormitories  for  girls  and  boys  as  are  found  in  Mis- 
sissippi, North  Carolina,  and  elsewhere.  Daily  rides  in  a 
school-bus  are  probably  preferable  to  being  away  from 
home  at  this  age.  If  we  are  to  realize  the  slogan  of  the 
United  States  Bureau  of  Education  and  rise  to  the  educa- 
tional standard  which  the  modern  age  is  making  imperative, 
a  high-school  education  for  every  hoy  and  girl,  no  other  plan 
seems  to  bring  it  more  quickly  and  permanently  in  the 
country  and  village  than  the  consolidated  school  with  free 
transportation  in  school-owned  vehicles. 

5.  Where  such  schools  are  established  in  large  numbers 
in  a  State,  as  in  several  States  already,  the  inevitable  ten- 
dency will  be  for  these  high  schools  to  increase  the  attendance 
and  service  of  agricultural  colleges  and  normal  schools,  both  of 
which  have  a  great  dearth  of  students  in  comparison  with 
State  and  national  needs.  The  demand  of  the  times  for 
trained  rural  teachers  and  agriculturists  and  for  real  leaders 
in  these  two  supremely  important  lines  is  at  present  either 
not  met  at  all  or  but  meagrely  satisfied.  Such  schools  more 
and  more  guide  pupils  back  to  rural  service.  The  con- 
solidated school,  in  our  judgment,  is  the  hope  of  these  im- 
portant and  fundamental  higher  schools  and  thus  the  hope 


I 


12  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

of  the  country.  What  they  should  do  in  encouraging  the 
entrance  of  high-school  graduates  to  their  schools  and  courses 
we  suggest  in  a  later  chapter. 

6.  A  better  programme  of  studies  can  be  provided,  based 
on  social  needs  and  the  nature  of  mental  and  physical 
growth  in  children.  The  range  and  quality  of  educational 
activities  in  a  one-room  school  are  necessarily  limited. 
Nearly  every  factor  in  the  situation  hinders  enrichment 
and  modernness  here.  Nothing  is  more  fraught  with  prom- 
ise fovr  rural  life  than  the  many  original  experiments  now 
being  carried  on  in  these  consolidated  schools  from  Cali- 
fornia to  Maine  and  from  Washington  to  Florida.  Even  the 
Philippines  and  Alaska  have  important  contributions  to 
suggest.  Psychologically,  a  new  country  or  a  new  type  of 
social  institution,  such  as  the  consolidated  school,  clears 
the  ground  of  retarding  tradition  and  opens  the  way  for 
progressive  experiment  and  adjustment.  Another  chapter 
by  the  editor  enters  more  fully  into  the  problem  of  the  pro- 
gramme of  studies  and  rural-school  curriculums.  A  city 
school  in  the  country  is  very  far  from  our  standard  for  this 
new  country  school.  The  needs  of  life  as  determined  by  in- 
telligent surveys  of  actual  life  furnish  the  starting-point 
for  real  education,  and  rural  needs  are  in  many  ways  very 
different  from  city  needs. 

7.  A  much-needed  and  better  social  centre  for  the 
larger  community  is  provided,  or  can  be  provided  and 
made  possible,  through  the  consolidated  school.  An  audi- 
torium and  gymnasium,  or  the  two  combined,  are  becoming 
standard  features  of  such  schools  as  of  the  best  city  schools. 
The  playground  is  larger  and  has  more  drawing  power  on 
the  community  and  pupils.  The  school-farm,  however  small, 
is  a  source  of  interest,  comment,  instruction,  and  community- 
meeting- together  for  agricultural  conference.  A  motion-pic- 
ture show  in  the  auditorium  is  one  of  the  chief  recreations 
of  the  people  of  many  consolidated- school  neighborhoods. 
A  glimpse  of  one  in  Ohio  is  given  in  a  later  chapter.     The 


Repioduced  by  courtesy  oj  Diuision  of  Agricultural  Idstruction,  U.  S.  Dept.  of  Agriculture 

Building  a  silo.     A  project  in  farm  mechanics  in  Minnesota 


NATIONAL  AND  RURAL  CONSOLIDATION  1 3 

daily  assembly  in  an  auditorium  can  be  made  more 
valuable  to  many  pupils  than  their  knowledge  of  any  sub- 
ject, and  may  legitimately  be  considered  an  important 
subject  of  the  curriculum.  Indeed,  auditorium  activities 
succeed  best  where  the  principal,  faculty,  and  students  give 
as  much  time  to  preparation  of  this  as  to  any  one  of  the 
regular  subjects.  School  fairs,  athletic  meets,  debating  and 
public-speaking  societies,  ''literaries,"  agricultural  and  other 
exhibits,  public  voting,  non-sectarian  religious  meetings, 
and  many  other  social-centre  activities  naturally  take  place 
here  in  the  single  public  building  possessed  by  all  the  peo- 
ple. The  post-office  is  being  located  in  a  number  of  schools 
and  parcel-post  buying  and  selling,  eliminating  large  middle- 
men profits,  is  being  experimentally  developed.  This  fea- 
ture is  also  expanded  in  later  chapters. 

Many  other  advantages  might  profitably  be  discussed. 
The  enlarged  social  mind  of  the  modern  countryman  who 
gets  about  in  his  automobile  over  a  wider  range  of  territory 
than  his  fathers  and  who  is  in  connection  by  other  means 
with  a  great  variety  of  persons  and  social  activities  easily 
adapts  itself  to  the  consolidated  school.  Some  difficulty 
may  be  met  in  establishing  such  a  school,  but  once  estab- 
lished it  quickly  becomes  a  part  of  the  community  life,  even 
as  the  motion-picture  machine,  the  automobile,  or  any 
other  clearly  desirable  creation  of  the  modern  age,  as  the 
following  letter  suggests: 

Worcester,  N.  Y.,  Sept.  15,  1915. 
Doctor  Thomas  E.  Finegan, 

AssL  Commissioner,  Education  Department,  Albany,  N.  Y. 

Dear  Sir: — I  am  owner  of  a  farm  in  union  free-school  district 
number  3,  Otsego  County,  N.  Y.  In  1915  six  school  districts  con- 
solidated. 

I  was  strongly  opposed  to  the  consolidation  and  to  the  new  school 
and  I  harbored  resentment  toward  our  district  superintendent  for 
establishing  it. 

After  one  year's  trial  and  observation  I  have  changed  my  mind. 
We  are  delighted  with  the   new  regime.     Our   twelve-year-old  girl 


14  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

passed  Regents'  examination  in  English,  geography,  arithmetic,  and 
United  States  history  during  the  year.  She  is  now  entering  the  high- 
school  department. 

For  six  teachers  in  poorly  equipped  buildings  we  have  received 
five  normal-school  and  college  graduates  in  one  modern  plant.  The 
work  is  now  graded  and  scientifically  conducted,  while  an  auto- 
mobile school-bus  calls  at  our  door  daily  to  transport  the  children. 
No  one  with  a  family  to  educate  would  willingly  go  back  to  the  old 
conditions.  Very  truly  yours, 

L.  J.  CoE. 

A  number  of  other  similar  letters  from  representative 
patrons,  pupils,  and  others  in  the  State  of  New  York  may 
be  found  in  the  annual  report  for  191 7  entitled  *^  Elemen- 
tary Education^'  of  the  Education  Department  of  the  Uni- 
versity of  the  State  of  New  York.  The  volume,  by  the 
way,  h  a  mine  of  information  on  and  illustrations  of  con- 
solidation in  that  great  State  which  until  recently  has  been 
doing  comparatively  little  in  this  line.  These  letters  could 
be  matched  by  correspondence  from  patrons  in  most  parts 
of  the  country.  That  by  the  time  this  chapter  is  read  some 
ten  thousand  or  more  such  schools  (with  consequent  aban- 
donment of  from  fifty  to  a  hundred  thousand  little  schools) 
will  have  been  established  is  our  best  argument.  After  giv- 
ing a  summary  of  advantg,ges  of  consolidation,  as  expressed 
by  the  present  State  Superintendent  of  North  Dakota  who 
has  had  much  experience  in  this  field,  we  shall  leave  dis- 
cussion of  further  advantages  to  later  chapters. 

A  detailed  statement  of  the  benefits  of  consolidation: 

1.  Increases  the  attendance. 

2.  Makes  the  attendance  more  regular. 

3.  Increases  the  enrolment. 

4.  Keeps  the  older  pupils  in  school  longer. 

5.  Provides  high  school  privileges  at  one-third  the  cost. 

6.  Makes  possible  the  securing  of  better-trained  teachers. 

7.  Results  in  higher  salaries  for  better-trained  teachers. 

8.  Makes  possible  more  and  better  grade  work. 

9.  Improves  industrial  conditions  in  the  country. 

10.  Enriches  the  civic-social  Ufe  activities. 


NATIONAL  AND  RURAL  CONSOLIDATION  1 5 

11.  Conserves  more  largely  the  health  and  morals  of  the  children. 

12.  Increases  the  number  of  eighth-grade  completions. 

13.  Provides  adequate  supervision. 

14.  Reduces  truancy  and  tardiness. 

15.  Develops  better  school  spirit,  i 

16.  Gives  more  time  for  recitations. 

17.  Increases  the  value  of  real  estate. 

18.  Produces  greater  pride  and  interest  in  country  life. 

19.  Prevents  the  drift  to  the  larger  towns  and  cities. 

20.  Brings  more  and  better-equipped  buildings. 

21.  Eliminates  the  small  weak  school. 

22.  Creates  a  school  of  greater  worth,  dignity,  and  usefulness. 

23.  Makes  possible  a  more  economical  school. 

24.  Provides  equal  educational  opportunities. 

25.  Gives  much  greater  and  better  results  in  every  way. 

IV.    The  Disadvantages  of  the  Consolidation 
Hypothesis 

The  disadvantages,  difficulties,  and  problems  of  the  con- 
solidated rural  school  are  taken  up  in  a  later  chapter  and  met 
by  convincing  argument.  We  need  not  summarize  them 
here.  The  chapter  may  be  read  immediately  if  desired. 
The  hardest  problem  is  to  get  a  real  consolidated  school, 
with  complete  or  fairly  complete  plant,  transportation,  and 
staff,  established.  After  that  it  is  its  own  best  argument. 
State  aid,  county  administration,  strong  county  superin- 
tendents, and  able  publicity  are  desirable.  The  teacher  is, 
however,  the  single  most  important  factor  in  education  and 
no  consolidated  or  other  school  can  be  a  success  with  poor 
teachers.  These  teachers  must  have  supervision,  training 
while  in  service,  reasonable  inducements  to  stay  at  the 
school  for  a  number  of  years,  and  satisfactory  equipment. 
The  pupils  should  be  gathered  from  a  large  enough  taxing 
and  transportational  area  to  make  possible  a  good  rural 
graded  school  with  high-school  provisions.  They  should  be 
transported  at  public  expense  in  first-class  conveyances 
under  the  best  supervision  obtainable.  Supervision  of  the 
recreation  of  the  pupils  in  the  auto  or  other  bus  is  ^ot  second 


1 6  THE  CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

in  importance  to  such  supervision  at  school  or  home.  The 
principal  must  be  an  educational  and  agricultural  leader, 
teacher,  supervisor,  and  trainer  of  teachers. 

Frequently  where  a  consolidated  school  is  found  disap- 
pointing or  little  better  than  the  one-room  system  but  few 
such  essentials  are  provided.  The  plant  may  be  called  a 
consolidated  school  when  it  is  little  more  than  a  two  to 
six  room  building  for  a  large  number  of  children  who  have 
to  walk  long  distances  and  be  instructed  by  poor  teachers 
without  supervision,  using  a  course  of  study  made  for  a 
city-school  system.  This  is  like  the  disappointment  aris- 
ing from  the  purchase  of  an  automobile  without  a  top,  side- 
curtains,  tires,  tool-box,  electric  starter,  instruction-book, 
bumper,  brakes,  mud-guards,  and  so  on.  The  thing  is  en- 
titled to  the  name  automobile,  but  automobiles  in  general 
should  not  be  judged  by  the  performance  of  a  poor,  ignorant 
driver  with  such  a  machine.  A  complete,  first-class  car  and 
a  skilled  chauffeur  give  durable  satisfactions  of  a  high  order. 
Later  chapters  give  detailed  descriptions  of  the  kind  of  con- 
solidated school  that  is  worthy  of  the  name  and  will  furnish 
a  real  rural-life  education  near  the  home  farms. 


V.    Summarizing  Principles 

In  Conclusion. — National  consolidation  of  interests  and 
efforts  are  taking  place  on  a  gigantic  scale  and  with  great 
rapidity  due  to  the  World  War  and  stimulated  enterprise. 
The  vast  industrial  activities  of  the  country  are  being  or- 
ganized into  combinations  that  tend  to  eliminate  waste  and 
competitive  inefficiency,  but  now  under  the  leadership  and 
regulation  of  a  democratic  government  instead  of  its  active 
opposition  and  hindering  laws.  If  government  regulation 
fails  or  is  less  effective,  everything  considered,  then  gov- 
ernment ownership,  then  nationalization  or  socialization,  of 
these  enterprises  will  be  undertaken  as  the  government  has 
already  taken  over  the  postal  service,  much  of  the  express 


NATIONAL  AND  RURAL  CONSOLIDATION  1 7 

business  in  the  parcel-post,  the  schools,  water-supplies,  and 
many  other  natural  monopolies.  The  prices  and  distribu- 
tion of  wheat,  corn,  cattle,  and  many  other  farm  products 
will  hereafter  be  handled  more  on  a  national  scale  and 
under  government  direction.  We  enter  to-day  a  period  of 
rapid  economic  and  social  nationalization.  Any  rural  region 
that  remains  individualistic,  reactionary,  with  an  education 
no  better  than  that  of  the  pioneer  type  of  single-room  school, 
is  bound  to  fall  behind  in  all  five  types  of  social  efficiency, 
vital,  vocational,  avocational,  civic,  and  moral. 

This  national  concentration  and  management  will  prob- 
ably not  tend  to  increase  the  size  of  farms,  as  Professor 
Vogt  indicates  in  his  "Rural  Sociology,"  although  it  will 
greatly  increase  the  need  of  broader  national  knowledge 
and  co-operation  among  farmers.  The  farm  will  and  should 
probably  remain  at  that  size  which  can  best  be  handled 
economically  by  the  average  rural  family  with  the  best 
of  modern  machinery  and  agricultural  science.  Tenant 
farming  will  be  decreased  and  ownership  will  again  become 
characteristic.  More  ideal  living  will  be  achieved  in  the 
rural  community,  and  a  chief  factor  in  this  rise  to  a  new 
standard  in  response  to  pressing  needs  will  be  a  new  type  of 
public,  democratic  school  appropriate  to  broader  rural  or- 
ganization and  higher  efficiency.  We  have  made  the  start 
toward  such  an  institution  by  the  present  consolidated 
school.  That  it  is  a  cure-all  for  every  rural  and  national  ill 
we  do  not  believe.  That  it  is  a  safe  and  progressive  line  of 
advance  we  have  no  doubt.    May  its  tribe  increase ! 

National  Rural-Educational  Principles. — ^As  a  fitting 
close  to  this  chapter  and  introduction  to  Commissioner 
Claxton's  masterly  survey  in  the  next,  we  append  the  fol- 
lowing resolutions  which  were  unanimously  adopted  at  a 
recent  national  conference  on  rural  education  and  leader- 
ship. 

''We  appeal  to  all  interests  for  hearty  co-operation  in  a 
nation-wide  campaign  for  the  improvement  of  our  rural 


l8  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

schools,  and  to  this  end  we  indorse  the  following  items 
agreed  on  and  adopted  at  the  Nashville  Conference  in  the 
fall  of  191 5: 

1.  An  academic  term  of  not  less  than  160  days  in  every  rural- 
school  commtmity. 

2.  A  sufficient  number  of  teachers  adequately  prepared  for  their 
work. 

3.  Consolidation  of  rural  schools  where  practicable. 

4.  A  teachers'  home  and  a  demonstration  farm  of  five. or  more 
acres  as  a  part  of  the  school  property. 

5.  An  all-year  school  adapted  to  local  conditions. 

6.  A  county  library  with  branch  libraries  at  the  centres  of  popu- 
lation, the  public  schools  to  be  used  as  distributing  centres. 

7.  Community  organization,  with  the  school  as  the  intellectual, 
industrial,  educational,  and  social  centre. 

8.  High-school  education  for  all  country  boys  and  girls  without 
severing  home  ties  in  obtaining  that  education. 

9.  Such  readjustment  and  reformation  of  the  courses  of  study  in 
elementary  and  secondary  rural  schools  as  will  adapt  them  to  the 
needs  of  rural  life. 

We  respectfully  submit  the  following  additional  items  for  the 
improvement  of  the  rural-school  situation: 

10.  We  express  our  approval  of  a  larger  unit  in  school  adminis- 
tration to  the  end  that  the  democratic  ideal  of  equal  opportunities  for 
all  children  may  prevail.  Americanism  should  mean  adequacy,  but 
this  quality  can  be  demonstrated  in  American  citizenship  only  when 
the  greatest  good  to  the  greatest  number  shall  become  the  cardinal 
principle  of  American  education. 

11.  We  believe  that  the  great  need  of  rural  elementary  teachers  is 
a  broad  mastery  of  a  fairly  limited  group  of  subjects,  each  rich  in 
social  values.  To  this  end  the  course  of  study  for  rural  teachers  in 
the  normal  schools  should  relate  specifically  to  the  problems  of  the 
rural  teachers.  Accordingly,  the  course  of  study  should  give  large 
place  to  history,  English  language  and  literature,  the  rural  sciences, 
including  economics,  marketing,  rural  organizations  and  administra- 
tion, and  recreation  and  play.  There  should  be  eliminated  the  for- 
eign languages,  the  higher  branches  of  mathematics,  and  such  other 
subjects  as  do  not  contribute  rather  definitely  to  the  full  performance 
of  the  rural  teachers'  task. 

12.  We  believe  that  the  great  American  need  is  an  intelligent  and 
productive  home-loving,  home-owning  rural  population.  We  urge, 
therefore,  the  great  demand  upon  the  rural  schools,  elementary  and 


NATIONAL  AND  RURAL  CONSOLIDATION  1 9 

high,  for  the  effective  teaching  of  agriculture  and  other  rural  ac- 
tivities. We  believe  that  a  home-project  plan  by  which  each  child 
conducts  some  agricultural  home  project  under  the  direction  and 
guidance  of  the  school,  coupled  with  the  demonstration  and  experi- 
mental farm  on  the  school  grounds  offers  a  satisfactory  and  effective 
means. 

13.  We  recommend  the  establishment  of  rural  normal-training 
teachers'  courses  in  normal  schools,  teachers*  colleges,  universities, 
and  agricultural  colleges  for  the  purpose  of  preparing  normal-training 
instructors,  that  these  instructors  may  train  their  students  for  a 
better  understanding  of  rural  conditions  and  how  to  meet  them,  and 
ultimately  prepare  them  for  better  teaching  and  more  effective  service. 

14.  We  recommend  the  establishment  of  county  travelling  li- 
braries for  use  of  rural  schools,  with  the  county  superintendents' 
office  as  the  distributing  centre. 

15.  Since  the  public  school  is  the  foundation  of  our  democracy  and 
since  the  ultimate  purpose  of  that  democracy  is  to  perpetuate  itself, 
we  believe  the  surest  road  to  this  end  is  for  the  people  to  exemplify 
in  the  community  itself  the  lessons  of  free  institutions  in  the  manage- 
ment of  their  public  schools.  We  realize  that  our  rural  schools  have 
not  kept  pace  with  other  lines  of  progress  and  that  new  levels  must  be 
reached.  In  order  to  realize  this  it  becomes  necessary  for  us  to  employ 
the  best  talent  to  co-operate  with  us,  for  which  we  must  return  a  just 
remuneration.  If  we  as  a  people  are  to  maintain  our  strength  we  must 
retain  our  responsibility.  Good  teaching  seeks  to  encourage  the  child 
to  develop  and  rely  upon  his  own  resources,  so  good  government 
seeks  to  inspire  a  people  to  unfold  their  own  powers  through  the 
proper  exercise  of  the  same." 


PROBLEMS   IN   APPLICATION 

1.  If  possible,  visit  at  least  one  single-room  school  and  a  consolidated 

school  and  compare  their  advantages  and  disadvantages. 

2.  Which  would  cost  a  community  more:  providing  first-class,  single- 

room  rural-school  plants  and  teachers  or  a  first-class  consoli- 
dated-school system? 

3.  Which  of  the  ten  suggested  solutions  of  the  rural-education  prob- 

lem have  been  put  into  successful  operation  in  your  present 
county  ? 

4.  What  are  the  relative  advantages  and  disadvantages  of  a  county 

high  school  or  schools  with  pupils  living  in  dormitories  and  of 
a  number  of  consolidated  elementary  and  high  schools  combined 
with  free  public  transportation?     (See  Doctor  Foght's  book  on 


20  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

"The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work"  for  descriptions  of  some  of 
the  Southern  boarding-schools.) 
$.  Make  a  list  of  rural  problems  as  suggested  by  Doctor  Vogt's  vol- 
ume on  "Rural  Sociology." 

6.  Has  the  city  had  any  such  advantage  over  the  country  as  sug- 

gested  in  this  chapter?    Give  your  reasons. 

7.  What  advantages  of  first-class  consolidation  have  been  omitted 

from  discussion  in  the  chapter? 

8.  Before  reading  further  make  a  list  of  the  arguments  country 

parents  and  others  would  make  against  consolidation. 

9.  Is  free  transportation  in  publicly  owned  vehicles  essential  to  the 

definition  of  a  consolidated  school? 

10.  In  what  ways  could  a  first-class  consolidated  school  promote 

larger  social  movements? 

11.  How  many  consolidated  schools  are  there  in  the  United  States? 

At  this  writing  (191 9)  there  are  nearly  eleven  thousand,  defining 
the  school  very  liberally  as  one  formed  by  the  union  of  two  or 
more  schools  for  better  educational  advantages,  and  at  least  two 
teachers  doing  graded  work.  It  should  include  public  transpor- 
tation, a  model  building,  and  superior  teachers  and  curriculum. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Vogt — "Rural  Sociology."     Appleton. 

2.  Carver — "Rural  Economics."     Macmillan. 

3.  Year-Books   of    the   United   States  Department   of  Agriculture, 

Washington,  D.  C. 

4.  Butterfield — Chapters  in  "Rural  Progress."     University  of  Chi- 

cago Press. 

5.  Suggestions  for  Parcels-Post  Marketing,  United  States  Depart- 

ment of  Agriculture,  Farmer's  Bulletin,  No.  703. 

6.  Rural-Life  Surveys  by:  The  Roosevelt  Commission;  The  Presby- 

terian Board  of  Home  Missions;  United  States  Bureau  of  Edu- 
cation, in  its  Educational  Surveys;  various  other  State  and 
private  organizations. 

7.  Foght— "The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work,"  Bibliography,  pp. 

345-354-  Macmillan. 

8.  Rapeer — "Educational   Hygiene,"   sections   on   health   sociology 

and  chapters  on  rural  health.     Scribner. 

9.  "Teaching  Elementary  School  Subjects,"  chap.  I.     Scribner. 

10.  Foght,  "Rural  Education,"  Bulletin,  1919,  No.  7,  U.  S.  Bureau  of 

Education.  Contains  list  of  surveys  of  rural  education  and 
present  country-life  commissions. 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  AMERICAN  RURAL   SCHOOL 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  To  what  extent  have  cities  profited  by  the  expenditures  of  the 

country  for  the  schooling  of  country  boys  and  girls?  (See 
chap.  VII,  on  Movements  of  Population,  in  Vogt's  "Rural 
Sociology,") 

2.  To  what  extent  are  cities  and  entire  states  and  the  nation  inter- 

ested in  and  responsible  for  the  proper  schooling  of  all  country 
children  ? 

3.  If  people  remained  all  their  lives  in  the  communities  where  they 

obtained  their  schooling,  and  each  community  thus  obtained  the 
product  of  its  expenditures,  great  or  little,  to  what  extent  would 
this  lessen  the  need  for  county.  State,  and  national  support? 

4.  What  did  the  draft  of  the  young  men  of  the  land  show  the  health 

conditions  to  be?  What  per  cent  were  rejected  for  physical 
defects?  What  per  cent  were  iUiterate?  See  " Second  Report 
of  the  Provost  Marshal  General,"  Government  Printing  Office, 
Washington,  D.  C. 

5.  How  many  single-room  schools  of  your  home  State  have  less  than 

fifteen  pupils? 

6.  What  per  cent  of  the  rural  teachers  in  your  home  State  have  a 

high-school  education?  What  per  cent  have  had  at  least  two 
years  of  normal-school  training  ?  What  per  cent  are  college  grad- 
uates ? 

7.  How  does  the  professional  and  general  training  of  the  rural  teacher 

compare  with  that  of  the  rural  physician?  Is  the  work  of  the 
one  less  skilled,  scientific,  professional,  or  less  important  than 
the  other? 

8.  What  per  cent  of  the  rural  pupils  of  your  home  State  graduate 

from  the  eighth  grade?     From  high  school? 

9.  What  is  the  unit  of  school  administration  in  your  home  State, 

district,  township  or  town,  or  county  control? 
10.  What  are  the  principal  educational  reforms  needed  in  your  home 
State  for  the  betterment  of  rural  education? 

Note. — The  reports  of  your  State  superintendent  or  commissioner 
of  public  schools,  the  reports  of  county  superintendents,  the  proceed- 


22  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

ings  of  State  teachers*  associations,  and  the  reports  of  any  educational 
and  social  surveys  made  by  the  United  States  Bureau  of  Education 
or  other  organization  will  be  of  help  in  this  preliminary  orientation. 
The  annual  reports  of  the  United  States  Commissioner  of  Education 
give  summaries  of  rural-school  progress  and  conditions.  Some  of  the 
above  problems  may  be  left  for  the  problems  in  application  after  read- 
ing the  chapter  if  desired,  although  this  is  not  recommended. 


I.    The  Rural-School  Problem 

In  our  industrial,  social,  civic,  and  religious  democracy 
everything  waits  on  education.  No  real  progress  and  no 
lasting  improvement  in  any  line  of  life  is  possible  except 
through  the  better  education  of  the  people.  The  deepest 
meaning  of  democracy  is  equality  of  opportunity.  This  is 
impossible  without  equality  of  opportunity  for  that  edu- 
cation which  prepares  for  life,  for  citizenship,  and  for  pro- 
ductive occupations.  Therefore  the  right  education  of  all 
the  people  becomes  our  chief  concern,  and  to  provide  better 
and  more  adequate  means  thereto  must  be  the  most  im- 
portant task  of  society  and  State.  Among  the  agencies  of 
education,  the  public  school  may,  I  believe,  fairly  be  con- 
sidered the  most  important. 

Since  almost  three-fifths  of  the  children  of  school  age  live 
in  the  open  country  and  in  small  towns  under  rural  con- 
ditions, and  since  more  than  three-fifths  of  the  enrolment  in 
the  public  schools  of  the  nation  is  in  the  public  schools  of 
rural  communities,  the  rural  public  school  represents  the 
larger  half  of  the  public-school  problem.  Since  the  drift- 
ing of  population  from  country  to  city  is  approximately 
400,000  a  year  and  that  from  city  to  country  is  almost 
negligible,  the  city  is  interested  in  the  schools  of  the  coun- 
try in  a  manner  and  to  a  degree  which  do  not  obtain  in  the 
reverse  direction.  Since  only  two- thirds  of  the  people  of 
the  country  as  a  whole  are  living  in  the  States  in  which  they 
were  born,  and  nearly  one-fifth  were  born  in  other  States  of 
the  Union  than  those  in  which  they  now  live,  and  since  these 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL  SCHOOL  23 

movements  from  State  to  State  are  largely  of  the  rural  popu- 
lation, the  improvement  of  the  rural  schools  of  any  State 
becomes  a  matter  of  interest  to  all  other  States  and  to  the 
nation  at  large.  Of  course  this  is  also  important  for  other 
and  still  more  important  reasons.  The  many  studies  of 
various  phases  of  the  rural  school  made  in  recent  years  and 
the  voluminous  discussions  in  books,  magazines,  and  the 
daily  press,  and  on  the  platform  indicate  an  increasing  gen- 
eral consciousness  of  these  facts.  It  is  therefore  no  new  nor 
small  problem  of  which  I  am  to  present  here  a  brief  outline, 
and  for  the  solution  of  which  I  am  to  try  to  offer  some  sug- 
gestions. 

Approximately  16,000,000  children  of  school  age  (6  to 
20)  live  in  the  rural  communities  of  the  United  States;  about 
11,000,000  of  these  are  enrolled  in  the  public  schools. 
Something  like  60  per  cent  of  those  enrolled  are  in  the  212,- 
000  one- teacher  schools;  the  remaining  40  per  cent  are  in 
consolidated  and  village  schools  having  two  or  more  teach- 
ers. The  average  enrolment  in  the  one-teacher  schools 
is  approximately  31,  which  is  less  by  6  or  8  than  the  aver- 
age enrolment  in  other  schools  of  country  and  city.  In 
more  than  one-fourth  of  these  one-teacher  schools  the  total 
enrolment  is  under  15,  and  in  a  large  part  of  these  it  is  less 
than  10.  In  many  such  schools,  therefore,  the  enrolment 
must  be  considerably  more  than  the  average  of  31.  In 
many  schools  the  actual  attendance  on  any  day  is  so  small 
as  to  make  the  per-pupil  cost  of  the  schools  very  large  and 
to  make  it  difficult  for  both  teachers  and  children  to  main- 
tain the  interest  necessary  for  any  profitable  work.  The 
State  superintendent  of  Iowa  reported  for  the  month  of 
January,  19 10,  250  schools  in  that  State  with  an  enrol- 
ment of  five  or  less,  and  1,814  with  an  enrolment  of  from 
6  to  II.  On  the  best  day  in  the  third  week  of  that  month 
10  schools  reported  an  actual  attendance  of  one  pupil  only; 
35,  two  each;  73,  three  each;  160,  four  each;  244,  five  each; 
thus  522  schools  reported  an  actual  attendance  of  five  or 


24  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

less.  The  average  daily  attendance  out  of  every  loo  pupils 
enrolled  was  in  1910,  for  the  city  schools,  79.3,  and  for  the 
rural  schools  only  67.6.  The  average  daily  attendance 
based  on  enrolment  fell  as  low  as  54.4  per  cent  in  Missis- 
sippi, 51.4  per  cent  in  Delaware,  and  51  per  cent  in  Mary- 
land. 

Even  in  the  great  State  of  New  York  in  191 5,  as  shown 
in  a  letter  on  the  imperative  need  of  a  larger  unit  of  rural- 
school  administration  and  school  consolidation  written  to 
the  legislature  of  the  State  by  Commissioner  Finley,  there 
were  11,642  elementary  schools.  Of  these,  8,430  were  one- 
room  schools.  In  almost  half  of  these  (3,580)  the  average 
attendance  for  19 13  was  ten  or  less,  as  follows: 

Average  Average 

Schools         Attendance  Schools  Attendance 

13 I  440 6 

74 2  533 7 

172 3  544 8 

235 4  631 9 

362 5  576 10 

The  Terms. — The  average  length  of  rural-school  terms 
in  1910  was  but  137.7  days;  for  city  schools  it  was  184.3 
days,  a  difference  of  46.6  days  in  favor  of  the  city  schools. 
The  average  length  of  term  of  the  rural  school  varied  in  the 
several  States,  from  90.1  days  in  New  Mexico,  93.3  days  in 
North  Carolina,  94.5  days  in  South  Carolina,  98  days  in 
Arkansas,  to  178  days  in  California,  178.6  days  in  New 
York,  1 8 1. 2  days  in  Connecticut,  and  190.2  days  in  Rhode 
Island.  The  difference  between  the  average  length  of  rural- 
school  term  and  that  of  city-school  term  varied  in  the  sev- 
eral States  from  3.8  days  in  Rhode  Island  and  Connecticut, 
8  days  in  California,  and  9.8  days  in  New  York,  to  68.5  days 
in  North  Carolina,  69.8  days  in  Alabama,  71.2  days  in  Ken- 
tucky, and  88.5  days  in  South  Carolina.  But  averages  do 
not  tell  the  whole  story  of  the  lack  of  equality  in  opportu- 


V. 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL  SCHOOL  25 

nity  for  education  in  the  rural  communities.  Recently  the 
Bureau  of  Education  asked  all  the  county  and  township 
superintendents  of  the  several  States  for  facts  about  in- 
dividual schools.  This  inquiry  revealed  the  fact  that  not  a 
few  rural  schools  are  in' session  less  than  three  school  months 
of  20  days  each,  and  a  few  only  a  little  more  than  one 
month.  In  Jeff  Davis  County,  Georgia,  the  average  length 
of  all  white  schools  was  reported  as  60  days;  in  Liberty 
County,  Georgia,  white  schools  were  reported  of  40,  50,  60, 
and  80  days,  colored  schools  of  30,  40,  and  50  days;  in  Wal- 
ton County,  Florida,  white  schools  of  30  and  60  days,  the 
average  for  the  county  being  80  days;  in  Putnam  County, 
Tennessee,  white  schools  of  27  and  40  days  were  reported, 
the  average  for  all  schools  being  90  days;  in  Lincoln  County, 
Nebraska,  schools  were  reported  of  59,  79,  86,  98,  99,  and 
up  to  160  days;  in  Shannon  County,  Missouri,  the  terms 
ranged  from  60  to  160  days.  These  examples  taken  at  ran- 
dom serve  to  indicate  the  wide  variety  of  conditions  in 
many  States.  The  average  daily  attendance  of  children 
enrolled  in  rural  schools  of  the  entire  country  is  approxi- 
mately 95  days.  For  a  few  States  it  is  less  than  60  days 
and  for  many  counties  less  than  40  days. 

The  School  Plants. — Within  the  last  ten  years  there  has 
been  a  very  encouraging  improvement  in  rural  schoolhouses 
and  their  equipment,  but  many  schools  are  still  taught  in 
houses  wholly  unfit  for  the  homes  of  children  during  the 
years  when  environment  means  so  much  for  health  of  body 
and  character  of  soul.  One  room,  poorly  built,  ugly,  badly 
lighted,  heated,  and  ventilated,  dirty,  with  uncared-for 
grounds,  no  adequate  supply  of  pure  water,  and  with  filthy 
outhouses  or  none — these  specifications  indicate  the  type  of 
rural  schoolhouse  still  all  too  common,  in  most  parts  of  the 
country. 

The  Administration. — Within  the  last  few  years  there 
has  also  been  a  commendable  increase  of  interest  in  the  im- 
provement of  rural-school  organization,  control,  and  super- 


26  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

vision,  and  some  improvement  has  been  made  in  most 
States.  However,  the  single-school  district  is  still  the  most 
common  unit  of  organization  and  control.  It  is  the  only 
basis  of  organization  and  control  for  the  rural  elementary- 
schools  of  seventeen  States  and  partly  so  for  four  other 
States.  It  is  the  largest  factor  in  organization  and  control 
in  seven  other  States  which  have  a  semi-county  system  in 
which  the  balance  of  power  rests  with  the  districts  rather 
than  with  the  counties.  There  may  be  as  many  as  30,000 
or  40,000  school  directors  in  some  of  these  States.  Some 
years  ago  one  State  superintendent  reported  that  there  were 
in  his  State  25,000  district  school  directors,  of  whom  5,000, 
he  said,  could  not  write  their  names.  Historically  neces- 
sary, the  usefulness  of  this  plan  of  school  organization  is 
now  passed  and  the  tendency  is  away  from  the  single-school 
district  to  the  large  unit  of  town,  township,  magisterial  dis- 
trict, or  county. 

The  tendency  toward  the  county  is  becoming  stronger. 
Nineteen  States  are  organized  on  the  county  basis  and 
several  others  have  a  semi-county  organization,  dividing 
control  between  county  and  some  smaller  unit — union  dis- 
trict, township,  or  single-school  district.  Several  other 
States  have  county  boards  of  education  with  limited  func- 
tions; thirty-nine  States  have  county  supervision,  three  have 
county  and  supervisory  district  supervision.  All  others 
have  some  kind  of  township  or  district  supervision,  but  in 
most  States  the  supervision  is  not  efficient  and  under  pres- 
ent conditions  cannot  be.  A  county  superintendent,  hav- 
ing meagre  education  and  no  professional  knowledge,  elected 
or  appointed  for  partisan  political  reasons,  paid  a  salary  so 
small  that  he  must  devote  most  of  his  time  to  some  other 
means  of  making  a  living,  and  dividing  the  remainder  of  his 
time  between  the  routine  business  of  his  office  and  the  super- 
vision of  a  hundred  or  more  schools  scattered  over  a  terri- 
tory of  three  to  five  hundred  square  miles,  this  territory 
being  traversed  by  bad  roads  during  a  good  part  of  the 


THE   AMERICAN   RURAL   SCHOOL 

One  Reason  Why  Positions  in  the  Country  Schools  of. 
Fisher  County  are  Not  Desirable 


27 


- ) 


93.5  Per  cent 
of  the  teachers  changed 
positions  in  1913-14i 


6.5  Per  cent 
of  the  teachers  did  not 
change  positions  in  191 3-1 4» 


IN  A  TOTAL  OF  SIXTY-TWO  TEACHERS; 

58  changed  positions  at  beginning  of  last  session. 
4  taught  two  years  at  same  place. 
None  taught  three  years  at  same  place. 
43  were  new  teachers  in  the  county. 

Contrast  this  with  the  schools  abroad  where  teachers  seldom  change 
more  than  once  in  a  lifetime. 

Does  any  other  public  or  private  business  permit  such  a  waste  by 
the  constant  changing  of  employees? 

If  positions  are  to  be  made  more  attractive  to  the  best  teachers 
and  if  the  school  is  to  attain  its  highest  efficiency,  there  must  be  a 

LONGER  TENURE  OF  OFFICE  FOR  THE  TEACHERS 

— From  "A  Study  of  Rural  Schools  in  Texas, ^^ 

Bulletin  of  University  of  Texas. 


28  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

time  the  schools  are  in  session,  cannot  be  expected  to  render 
much  help  to  the  individual  schools  and  teachers  nominally 
under  his  charge.  In  some  States  in  the  South  professional 
supervisors,  one  or  more  to  a  county,  are  employed  to  assist 
the  county  superintendents  in  their  professional  duties,  but 
the  number  of  such  supervisors  is  still  comparatively  small. 
The  Teachers. — While  many  earnest  and  scholarly  men 
and  women  are  to  be  found  among  teachers  of  rural  schools 
in  all  States,  the  average  preparation  of  these  teachers  is 
much  lower  than  that  of  the  teachers  in  our  city  schools. 
Some  studies  made  by  A.  C.  Monahan  and  Harold  W. 
Foght  of  the  Bureau  of  Education  show  quite  clearly  that 
most  of  the  teachers  in  the  rural  schools  have  neither  the 
education  nor  the  professional  knowledge  and  training 
necessary  for  success,  either  in  teaching  or  in  school  manage- 
ment, nor  do  they  remain  at  one  place  long  enough  to  enable 
them  to  gain  the  influence  in  the  community  which  the 
teacher  must  have  for  the  full  accomplishment  of  his  duties. 
There  are  approximately  265,000  rural-school  teachers  in 
the  United  States.  Foght  sent  a  questionnaire  to  6,000  of 
these  in  55  typical  counties,  every  State  being  represented. 
He  received  2,941  replies.  It  may  be  safely  concluded  that 
those  from  whom  the  returns  were  received  were  the  better 
teachers  rather  than  the  worst.  Twenty-five  per  cent  of 
these  were  men,  75  per  cent  women,  18  per  cent  of  all  were 
married.  Four  per  cent  had  less  than  eight  years  of  school- 
ing; 32.3  per  cent  (one- third)  had  no  professional  training, 
not  even  that  which  can  be  gained  by  attendance  a  few 
weeks  at  a  summer  school.  Their  average  age  at  the  time 
they  began  teaching  was  19.2  years;  at  the  time  of  the  in- 
vestigation 26  years.  They  had  an  average  of  45  months' 
experience  in  teaching,  gained  through  an  average  period 
of  6.8  years  in  an  average  of  3.4  different  schools.  They 
had  been  12.2  months  in  the  schools  in  which  they  were 
then  teaching  and  had  remained  in  each  school  in  which 
they  had  taught  an  average  of  13.8  months.    Twenty-six 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL  SCHOOL  29 

and  five-tenths  per  cent  had  attended  a  normal  school  and 
3.4  per  cent  had  finished  a  normal-school  course;  19  per 
cent  had  attended  a  college  of  some  kind,  and  7.3  per  cent 
had  completed  some  sort  of  college  course.  Only  20  out  of 
the  entire  number  had  attended  schools  preparing  especially 
for  work  in  rural  schools  and  giving  courses  in  rural  economics. 

The  average  salaries  of  the  teachers  replying  to  Foght's 
questionnaire  was  $350.  Monahan  reported  the  average 
yearly  salary  of  teachers  in  one- teacher  schools  in  19  States 
to  be  $307.51,  and  the  average  salaries  of  all  teachers  in 
these  States  to  be  $430.60.  In  one  State  the  average  annual 
salary  in  one- teacher  rural  schools  was  $143.73,  j^^^  $2.27 
less  than  the  cost  of  feeding  a  prisoner  two  meals  a  day  in 
the  county  jails  of  the  State.  There  were,  of  course,  many 
teachers  whose  salaries  were  less  than  the  average. 

The  studies  in  most  rural  schools,  despite  all  talk  about 
redirection,  are  still  practically  the  same  as  they  were  when 
they  were  copied  without  much  adaptation  from  the  schools 
of  the  cities.  There  has  been  in  some  places  some  adapta- 
tion of  readers  and  arithmetics  to  the  special  needs  of  coun- 
try children,  and  in  some  rural  high  schools  some  instruction 
is  given  in  agriculture.  The  laws  of  several  States  require 
that  agriculture  shall  be  taught  in  the  elementary  schools, 
but  httle  effective  teaching  of  these  subjects  can  be  found 
in  most  schools  of  this  grade.  A  girl  who  does  not  know 
barley  from  oats  cannot  accomplish  much  with  a  flower- 
pot for  a  demonstration  farm  in  a  school  that  closes  before 
the  time  of  planting  field  and  garden  crops  begins. 

Of  the  teachers  replying  to  Foght's  questionnaire,  66 
per  cent  were  giving  instruction  in  eight  grades  or  more 
and  heard  from  25  to  35  recitations  per  day;  probably  the 
average  number  of  class  recitations  per  teacher  per  day  in 
the  one-room  country  school  is  32.  Muerman  gives  this 
number  as  the  typical  number  for  the  schools  of  the  West. 
If  every  minute  of  the  five-hour  school-day  could  be  used  for 
recitations,  the  recitations  would  have  an  average  of  g}4 


30  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

minutes  each.  But  much  less  than  the  full  time  can  be  so 
used,  probably  not  more  than  three  hours — i8o  minutes. 

There  are  many  interruptions.  Coming  and  going  of 
classes  consumes  much  time,  as  do  also  cases  of  discipline. 
Muerman  counted  273  questions,  more  or  less  useless,  asked 
by  pupils  of  the  teacher  in  one  school  in  the  course  of  one 
day.  The  lesson  periods  average  six  or  seven  minutes,  three 
or  four  minutes  for  classes  in  lower  grades  and  10  or  12  in 
some  of  the  more  important  classes  of  the  higher  grades. 
It  may  easily  be  seen  that  the  actual  time  any  child  gives 
to  school  work  cannot  be  long.  Studies  made  in  schools  in 
different  parts  of  the  country  indicate  an  average  time  of 
lyi  to  2  hours  for  children  in  the  first  two  or  three  grades, 
2  or  3  hours  at  most  for  children  in  the  intermediate  grades, 
and  not  more  than  3K  or  4  hours  for  those  of  the  higher 
grades.  I  have  found  schools  in  which  the  smaller  children 
gave  attention  to  any  school  work  either  at  study  or  at 
recitation  less  than  30  minutes  a  day.  If  all  children  of 
most  rural  schools  did  intensive  work  for  2^  hours  in  the 
morning  and  then  went  home,  much  more  might  be  accom- 
plished than  is  now  accomplished. 

Until  a  half-dozen  years  ago  there  were  very  few  high 
schools  in  the  rural  communities  of  most  States  and  more 
than  half  of  the  boys  and  girls  of  rural  America  are  still 
without  free  access  to  any  good  high  school  with  full  courses 
of  four  years.  One-fourth  or  more  of  all  boys  and  girls  of 
this  generation  get  some  high-school  education,  but  the 
proportion  is  much  smaller  in  the  communities  in  the  open 
country  than  in  villages,  towns,  and  cities.  Frequently  the 
country  high  school  has  only  one 'or  two  teachers,  and  often 
these  are  very  poorly  prepared  to  do  high-school  work. 

So  much  for  the  schools  as  they  are;  now  a  few  words  as 
to  their  more  important  needs  and  some  suggestions  as  to 
how  these  needs  may  be  met. 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL  SCHOOL  3 1 

II.    Rural-School  Needs 

Longer  School  Terms. — Probably  the  most  patent  need 
of  the  rural  schools  is  a  very  large  increase  in  the  average 
length  of  school  term  and  a  nearer  approach  to  equality  in 
length  of  term  in  all  these  schools.  The  American  school 
term,  even  in  the  cities,  is  short  as  compared  with  the  school 
terms  of  other  countries.  In  most  of  Europe  the  schools 
are  in  session  from  200  to  250  days.  In  Australia  rural 
schools  run  225  days  or  more.  I  know  no  reason  why  Amer- 
ican boys  and  girls  need  fewer  days  of  schooling  than  those 
of  other  progressive  and  cultured  countries,  nor  do  I  know 
any  reason  why  boys  and  girls  in  the  country  need  fewer 
days  of  schooling  than  they  would  need  if  they  lived  in 
city  or  town.  It  would  be  still  more  difficult  to  imagine  a 
reason  why  in  our  democratic  republic  made  up  of  these 
States  we  should  be  content  to  give  the  children  of  one 
rural  community  opportunity  of  schooling  through  only  40 
or  50  days  when  those  living  in  other  communities  have 
access  to  better  schools  and  for  three  or  four  times  as  many 
days,  or  why  we  should  as  a  people  be  content  that  the 
children  of  one  State  may  have  only  90  days  of  schooling 
in  the  year  while  those  of  another  may  have  180  days  or 
more.  Surely  we  no  longer  think  of  education  as  a  private 
matter,  ajffecting  only  the  individual.  The  public  welfare, 
in  which  the  private  weal  is  bound  up,  depends  on  and  de- 
mands the  education  of  all. 

More  Money  Better  Spent. — For  longer  terms  and  a 
nearer  approach  to  uniformity  in  length,  larger  tax  rates, 
wiser  economy  in  the  use  of  funds,  and  in  many  States 
larger  units  of  support  and  administration  will  be  necessary. 
All  these  should  be  comparatively  easy  of  attainment. 
School  taxes  are,  as  a  rule,  very  low  and  expenditures  for 
education  very  small  as  compared  with  taxes  and  expendi- 
tures for  other  purposes  and  with  the  value  and  impor- 
tance of  the  results.    We  are  yet  far  from  Doctor  Eliot's  ideal 


32  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

of  expenditure  for  the  education  of  the  child  equal  to  that 
for  its  food  or  clothing.  In  191 2  the  total  expenditure  for 
all  public-school  purposes  in  the  United  States  averaged 
$5.05  per  capita  of  the  total  population.  This  average 
ranged  from  $1.52  in  Alabama  and  $1.53  in  South  Carolina 
to  $9.18  in  Utah  and  $9.30  in  California.  In  that  year  the 
total  expenditure  for  public  schools  was  approximately 
$483,000,000;  but  only  $285,000,000,  less  than  59  per  cent 
of  the  whole,  was  for  teachers'  salaries.  Teachers'  salaries, 
the  most  important  item  in  the  lengthening  of  the  school 
term,  could  therefore  be  doubled  with  an  increase  of  less 
than  60  per  cent  in  the  total  expenditures.  This  would 
give  a  substantial  increase  in  the  monthly  salaries  of  teach- 
ers and  at  the  same  time  lengthen  the  school  term  to  an 
average  of  180  or  200  days.  Since  the  average  for  city 
schools  is  already  more  than  184  days,  the  increase  possible 
by  this  increase  of  60  per  cent  in  the  total  expenditure 
might  be  so  used  as  to  bring  the  rural  schools  up  to  the  full 
term  of  the  city  schools,  even  after  adding  both  to  the 
monthly  salary  of  city  and  country  teachers  and  to  the 
length  of  the  city-school  term.  Even  if  no  addition  were 
made  to  the  monthly  salary  of  the  teacher,  the  larger  an- 
nual salary  that  would  come  with  a  longer  school  term 
would  increase  the  efficiency  of  the  schools  in  other  ways 
and  especially  by  putting  and  keeping  in  the  schools  better 
teachers  and  giving  them  more  opportunity  for  experience 
and  enabling  them  to  concentrate  their  energies  to  a  greater 
extent  on  the  work  of  the  school.  It  is  the  salary  for  the 
year  rather  than  for  the  month  that  counts.  I  believe  no 
thinking  man  or  woman  with  any  knowledge  of  economic 
causes  and  conditions  will  deny  that  this  increase  in  school 
funds  might  be  made  both  easily  and  profitably.  It  would 
be  easy  to  show  where  much  more  than  this  amount  could 
be  saved  in  public  or  private  expenditures  without  injury 
to  any  useful  cause. 

Larger  Units  of  Support  and  Control. — Per  capita  wealth 
varies  sharply  from  section  to  section  and  from  one  local 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL  SCHOOL  33 

community  to  another  and  the  variations  are  not  always 
due  to  the  industry  or  other  virtues  of  the  people  or  to  the 
lack  of  them.  Fertile  lands,  mines,  the  convergence  of 
highways  and  railways,  position  with  regard  to  natural 
routes  of  commerce,  for  none  of  which  the  people  of  the 
community  are  primarily  responsible,  enable  the  people  of 
one  community  to  obtain  larger  results  upon  their  invest- 
ments of  labor  and  capital  than  those  of  another,  and  possi- 
bly to  levy  tribute  upon  the  smaller  returns  of  others. 
Therefore,  while  local  communities  may  and  probably 
should  tax  themselves  for  houses  and  equipment,  and  to  a 
sufficient  extent  to  insure  the  maximum  interest  in  the 
schools,  the  larger  part  of  the  school  funds  should  be  raised 
by  taxes  levied  on  all  the  taxable  property,  rural  and  urban 
alike,  of  both  county  and  State.  In  most  States  half  the 
funds  for  running  expenses  for  the  schools  might  well  come 
from  county  taxes  and  half  from  State  taxes,  no  county  to 
receive  any  part  of  the  State  funds  until  it  had  levied  a 
county  school  tax  of  not  less  than  a  given  minimum.  Some 
part  of  the  school  fund  should  always  be  set  apart  toliSp 
counties  m  proportion  to  their  Heedsi  This  part  might  be 
apportioned  to  the  several  counties  of  the  State  in  propor- 
tion to  school  population  (or  aggregate  attendance)  and  in- 
versely as  the  ratio  of  taxable  property  to  school  population, 
as  is  done  in  Tennessee.  The  idea  that  the  federal  govern- 
ment through  some  modification  of  its  earlier  policy  by 
which  it  gave  millions  of  acres  of  public  lands  for  the  sup- 
port of  public  schools  should  conserve  and  promote  all  its 
most  important  interests  by  devoting  some  part  of  its  large 
revenues  (larger  by  much  than  the  total  revenues  of  all  the 
States  combined)  to  public  education  and  so  apportion  its 
appropriations  for  this  purpose  as  to  even  up  to  some  ex- 
tent at  least  the  great  difference  in  school  facilities  caused 
by  difference  in  taxpaying  ability  in  the  several  States,  and 
at  the  same  time  give  the  largest  possible  encouragement  to 
the  States  to  help  themselves,  leaving  to  the  States  full 
freedom  in  the  development  and  control  of  their  school 


34  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

systems,  is  too  fascinating  and  at  the  same  time  too  difficult 
and  wide  of  application  for  discussion  in  this  paper;  but  it 
is  worthy  of  the  most  careful  consideration  of  all  patriots, 
economists,  and  statesmen.  The  large  federal  contributions 
to  the  States  now  for  vocational  education  are  no  more 
worthily  spent  than  millions  more  each  year  could  be  ex- 
pended for  other  objects. 

With  the  larger  units  of  support  must,  of  course,  come 
larger  units  of  control  and  more  efficient  agencies  of  ad- 
ministration and  supervision.    It  is  seldom  wise  to  give  to 
small  communities  funds  from  what  appears  to  them  a  for- 
eign treasury  without  making  at  the  same  time  suitable  pro- 
vision for  its  expenditure.    Examples  of  the  bad  effects  of 
such  a  policy  are  too  numerous  to  require  specification.    In 
^  all  those  States  in  which  the  county  is  the  unit  for  other 
/^governmental  purposes  it  should  be  the  unit  also  for  school 
•'administration.    In  the  New  England  States,  where  the 
town  is  the  governmental  unit,  it  should  also,  no  doubt,  be 
the  unit  of  school  administration,  as  it  is.    In  the  State  of 
New  York,  with  its  strongly  centralized  system,  supervision 
may  well  be  under  the  immediate  direction  of  the  State 
with  its  district  superintendents  as  its  agents. 

Plan  of  County-School  Organization. — In  a  circular  let- 
ter sent  out  some  time  ago  by  the  Bureau  of  Education 
and  republished  in  bulletin  1914,  No.  44,  the  Bureau  of 
Education  suggests  the  following  plan  of  county-school  or- 
ganization: 

1.  The  county  the  unit  of  taxation  and  administration  of  schools 
(except  that,  in  administration,  independent  city  districts  employing 
a  superintendent  would  not  be  included). 

2.  A  county-school  tax  levied  on  all  taxable  property  in  the  county, 
covered  into  the  county  treasury,  and  divided  between  the  independent 
city  districts  and  the  rest  of  the  coimty  on  a  basis  of  the  school  popu- 
lation. ^ 

^  This  basis  is  suggested  for  the  division  between  the  county  district  and 
the  independent  city  districts.    The  county  board  of  education  would  expend 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL  SCHOOL  35 

3  The  county-school  funds,  including  those  raised  by  taxation  and 
those  received  from  the  State,  expended  in  such  a  way  as  would  as 
nearly  as  possible  insure  equal  educational  opportunities  in  all  parts  of 
the  county,  regardless  of  the  amount  raised  in  any  particular  part. 
(Any  subdistrict  should  be  permitted  to  raise,  by  taxation  or  otherwise, 
additional  funds  to  supplement  the  county  funds,  provided  the  sub- 
district  desired  a  better  school  plant,  additional  equipment,  or  a 
more  efficient  teaching  force  than  could  be  provided  from  the  county 
funds.) 

4.  A  county  board  of  education,  in  which  is  vested  the  adminis- 
tration of  the  public  schools  of  the  county  (except  those  in  independent 
city  districts),  composed  of  from  five  to  nine  persons,  elected  or  ap- 
pointed from  the  county  at  large;  the  board  to  be  non-partisan;  the 
term  of  office  to  be  at  least  five  years,  and  the  terms  arranged  so  that 
not  more  than  one-fifth  would  expire  in  any  one  year. 

5.  A  county  superintendent  of  schools,  a  professional  educator, 
selected  by  the  county  board  of  education,  from  within  or  without  the 
county  or  State,  for  a  long  term  (at  least  two  years),  who  shall  serve 
as  the  secretary  and  executive  ofiicer  of  the  county  board  and  as  such 
be  the  recognized  head  of  the  public  schools  in  the  county  (except 
those  in  independent  city  districts). 

6.  District  trustees  in  each  subdistrict  of  the  county,  one  or  more 
persons,  elected  by  the  voters  of  the  district  or  selected  by  the  county 
board,  to  be  custodians  of  the  school  property  and  to  serve  in  an  ad- 
visory capacity  to  the  county  board.  The  expenditures  of  local  funds 
raised  by  the  subdistrict  would  rest  with  the  trustees  subject  to  the 
approval  of  the  county  board. 

7.  The  powers  and  duties  of  the  county  board  of  education: 

(a)  To  select  a  county  superintendent,  who  would  be  its  secretary 
and  executive  ofiicer  in  the  performance  of  all  of  its  other  functions, 
and  to  appoint  assistants  as  required. 

(b)  To  have  general  control  and  management  of  the  schools  of  the 
county. 

(c)  To  submit  to  the  regular  county  taxing  authority  estimates  of 
the  amount  of  money  needed  to  support  the  schools. 

(d)  To  regulate  the  boundaries  of  the  school  subdistricts  of  the 
county,  making  from  time  to  time  such  alterations  as  in  its  judgment 
would  serve  the  best  interests  of  the  county  system. 

(e)  To  locate  and  erect  school  buildings. 

the  funds  of  the  county  district  according  to  the  needs  of  the  various  schools, 
not  according  to  school  population.  This  does  not  mean  among  the  subdis- 
tricts on  the  school  popvdation  basis. 


^6  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

(/)  To  supply  the  necessary  equipment. 

(g)  To  fix  the  course  of  study  and  select  text-books  (using  the  State 
course  and  State-adopted  text-books  in  the  States  where  action  has 
been  taken). 

(h)  To  enforce  the  compulsory  education  laws. 

(i)  To  employ  teachers,  fix  their  salaries  and  the  salaries  of  other 
employees. 

Experience  shows,  I  believe,  the  wisdom  of  some  such 
policy. 

Better  State  Administration. — In  most  States  there  is 
urgent  need  of  some  reform  in  State  administration.  Possi- 
bly the  ideal  organization  for  the  State  would,  in  most 
cases,  be  a  State  board  of  education  of  seven  or  nine  mem- 
bers, elected  or  appointed  from  the  State  at  large,  the  terms 
of  office  for  the  members  expiring  in  such  a  way  as  to  reduce 
to  a  minimum  the  possibility  of  packing  the  board  for 
sinister  purposes.  In  a  board  of  nine  members  the  tenure 
of  office  might  well  be  nine  years,  the  terms  of  not  more  than 
two  members  expiring  in  any  biennium.  This  board  should 
elect  a  State  superintendent  or  commissioner  of  education 
and  all  his  assistants  from  the  world  at  large  and  should 
have  power  to  remove  any  of  them  for  cause.  Among  the 
assistants  of  the  chief  State  school  officer  should  be  a  suffi- 
cient number  of  supervising  specialists  and  the  office  should 
have  the  power  to  require  prompt,  faithful,  and  intelligent 
performance  of  duty  by  county-school  officials. 

Ruralized  High  Schools  for  All. — In  rural  communities, 
as  elsewhere,  all  boys  and  girls  should  have  free  access  to 
good  high  schools  so  organized  as  to  give  such  education  as 
is  adapted  to  the  early  and  middle  years  of  adolescence  and 
to  prepare  them  for  the  duties  and  responsibilities  of  life 
and  citizenship  and  for  some  useful  occupation  by  which 
they  may  make  their  living  and  contribute  toward  the  sup- 
port of  the  commonwealth.  Let  me  quote  here  from  my 
introduction  to  the  Report  of  the  Commissioner  of  Educa- 
tion for  the  year  ended  June  30,  1913: 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL   SCHOOL  37 

The  complex  problems  of  our  political,  civic,  industrial,  social,  and 
spiritual  democracy  demand  of  the  masses  of  the  people  more  exten- 
sive knowledge  of  facts  and  principles  than  can  be  given  by  the  ele- 
mentary schools,  and  a  discipline  and  training  different  from  any 
which  can  be  gained  in  childhood  before  the  years  of  adolescence. 
Children  learn  by  imitation  and  accept  and  act  on  authority.  In  the 
preadolescent  years  they  are  unable  to  reason  inductively  to  great 
fundamental  principles,  formulate  them  into  words,  and  reason  from 
them  by  deduction  to  intelligent  practical  applications  in  concrete 
new  instances.  But  this  is  just  what  is  most  needed  for  the  self- 
guidance  required  by  democratic  institutions  and  life.  The  education 
possible  in  childhood  may  be  sufficient  for  citizenship  in  a  benevolent 
despotism  where  a  "little  father"  rules  over  his  "children,"  in  a 
society  of  rigid  and  unyielding  stratification,  in  a  feudaUstic  indus- 
trial organization  in  which  the  masses  of  people  are  only  unthinking 
"hands,"  and  in  a  spiritual  despotism  in  which  freedom  of  thought  is 
unknown;  but  democratic  government,  government  of  the  people,'  by 
the  people,  and  for  the  people,  is  manhood  government.  Democratic 
institutions  of  whatever  kind  demand  of  all  who  participate  in  them 
such  self-guidance  as  is  impossible  without  an  understanding  of  gen- 
eral principles  and  the  habit  of  consecutive,  abstract  reasoning  and 
individual  initiative  and  self-restraint. 

We  must  find  some  way  of  continuing  the  education  of  the  great 
majority  of  children  through  the  high-school  period,  through  the 
years  of  early  and  middle  adolescence.  Under  present  economic  con- 
ditions this  will  be  possible  only  when  we  can  find  or  devise  some  way 
by  which  boys  and  girls  may  contribute  to  their  own  support  while 
attending  school,  or  of  continuing  their  studies  out  of  school.  In  rural 
farming  communities  this  is  comparatively  easy.  Where  good  high 
schools  are  maintained  in  such  communities  and  there  are  good  ele- 
mentary schools  to  prepare  for  them,  the  per  cent  of  high-school  at- 
tendance is  much  larger  than  in  most  cities  and  manufacturing  towns. 

Better  Subject-Matter. — Courses  of  study  in  rural 
schools  need  reconstruction  and  redirection.  As  human  be- 
ings and  as  citizens,  men  and  women  living  in  the  country 
have  the  same  or  similar  interests  in  the  humanities  (the 
term  is  used  in  its  broad  sense)  and  things  pertaining  to 
civic  life  and  citizenship  as  other  people  have.  But  as 
farmers  and  farmers'  wives,  making  their  living  from  the 
soil  and  living  in  isolated  country  homes,  their  interests 


38  THE  CONSOLroATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

differ  widely  from  those  of  men  and  women  of  the  laboring 
and  professional  classes  in  the  cities.  Whatever  may  have 
been  the  case  in  the  past,  it  has  now  come  about  that  farm- 
ers need  a  fuller  and  more  extensive,  more  varied  and  thor- 
ough, knowledge  and  more  comprehensive  grasp  of  funda- 
mental principles  and  greater  power  of  adjustment  than 
men  in  any  other  trade  or  profession.  The  same  is  true  of 
the  farmer's  wife  as  compared  with  other  women.  Of  the 
chemistry  and  physics  of  the  soil,  of  plant  and  animal  life, 
of  methods  of  tillage,  of  the  feeding  and  care  of  animals,  of 
plant  and  animal  diseases  and  the  means  of  protection 
against  them,  of  farm  machinery  and  its  operation,  care,  and 
management,  of  buying  and  selling,  of  bookkeeping  and  the 
business  side  of  farm  life,  of  fertilizers  and  the  means  of  pre- 
serving the  fertility  of  the  soil,  of  the  breeding  of  plants 
and  animals,  of  road-making  and  forestry,  of  drainage  and 
irrigation,  of  the  sanitation  of  the  farm  home,  of  the  best 
use  of  the  food  products  of  the  farm,  of  the  care  of  children 
in  isolated  country  homes  (where  the  physician  cannot  be 
called  at  a  moment's  notice  and  where  municipal  engineers 
do  not  look  after  every  detail  of  sanitation),  of  the  early 
education  of  children,  and  of  many  other  things  on  a  knowl- 
edge of  which  the  success,  prosperity,  and  happiness  of  the 
farmer  and  his  wife  depend — nearly  all  country  schools  at 
the  present  time  take  little  account.  Their  courses  of  study 
need  to  be  remade  upon  the  basis  of  what  the  farmer  needs 
to  know,  and  their  teaching  must  take  into  consideration  the 
environment  and  the  raw  material  and  experience  which  the 
country  boy  and  girl  bring  to  school. 

Need  of  Rural  Surveys. — Just  what  the  course  or  courses 
of  study  in  any  rural  school  should  be  cannot  be  determined 
until  careful  and  thorough  studies  have  been  made  of  the 
vocational  life  of  men  and  women  living  normal  lives  in 
normal  rural  communities.  Such  studies  must  take  into 
consideration  what  these  men  and  women  need  to  learn  of 
each  branch  of  knowledge  and  of  its  possible  and  probable 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL  SCHOOL  39 

applications  in  their  life-work.  As  a  first  step  in  such  a 
study  the  Bureau  of  Education  some  time  ago  sent  question- 
naires to  a  thousand  farmers  and  as  many  farmers'  wives 
living  on  and  by  their  farms  in  the  open  country  in  several 
different  States.    The  questions  were  as  follows; 

Please  state  briefly  what  the  farmer  should  know  about 
i)  Physics. 

2)  Chemistry. 

3)  Biology. 

4)  Meteorology. 

5)  The  soil. 

6)  Cultivation  of  the  soil. 

7)  Fertilizers. 

8)  Plant  life. 

9)  Selecting  seeds. 

10)  Propagation  by  budding,  grafting,  etc. 

11)  Harvesting  crops. 

12)  Animal  life. 

13)  Insects  and  birds. 

14)  Feeding. 

15)  Breeding. 

16)  Marketing  crops  and  live  stock. 

17)  Farmers'  buying,  selling,  and  credit  co-operation. 

18)  Preserving  fruits  and  meats. 

19)  Machinery,  its  operation  and  its  care. 

20)  Care  of  trees  and  forests. 

21)  Keeping  accounts. 

22)  Banking. 

23)  Commercial  and  common  law. 

24)  Farm  buildings. 

25)  Engineering. 

26)  Road  building. 

27)  Farm  sanitation. 

28)  Other  subjects  connected  directly  with  the  farmer's  life. 

It  is  the  purpose  of  the  bureau  to  send  these  to  other 
thousands  of  farmers  and  farmers'  wives  and  to  supplement 
this  by  somewhat  similar  questions  for  supervisors  and  in- 
structors in  agriculture  and  home  economics  in  colleges  and 
high  schools,  and  for  students  of  rural  economy.    But  all 


40  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

these  will  not  help  far.  They  can  serve  only  as  a  beginning. 
Thorough,  extensive  rural  surveys  must  be  made  by  experts 
on  the  ground  in  different  parts  of  the  country  very  much  as 
industrial  surveys  have  been  made  in  Richmond,  Minne- 
apolis, and  many  other  cities.  There  must  also  be  simi- 
lar surveys  as  to  the  duties  and  responsibilities  of  citi- 
zenship in  civic  and  social  life  in  rural  communities  and  of 
the  preparation  necessary  for  their  intelligent  and  success- 
ful performance.  When  these  surveys  have  been  made  and 
a  body  of  necessary  knowledges,  skills,  ideals,  and  abilities 
has  been  formulated,  men  and  women  learned  and  wise  in 
methods  of  education  and  of  child  development  must  de- 
termine which  of  them  can  be  taught  in  the  schools;  how  and 
in  what  order,  and  to  what  extent,  and  also  how  they  can 
be  organized  and  transmuted  into  the  things  we  call  dis- 
cipline and  culture;  for  the  man  who  turns  the  clods  must 
not  be  permitted  to  be  a  clod  himself,  even  though  an  in- 
telligent and  skilled  one.  There  must  be  in  him  also  some- 
thing that  aspires  and  sings. 

In  the  country  even  more  than  in  the  city  is  it  important 
that  there  should  be  a  very  close  co-operation  between  the 
school  and  the  home.  If  the  teacher  knows  how  to  discover 
and  use  it,  the  out-of-school  experiences  of  country  children 
give  them  a  larger  fund  of  rich  raw  material  for  reworking 
and  interpretation  in  the  schools  than  the  out-of-school  ex- 
periences of  city  children  give  to  them.  For  most  of  the 
knowledge  which  should  be  gained  in  school  by  country 
children  there  is  a  readier  and  wider  application  in  country 
life  than  for  the  knowledge  gained  by  city  children  in  city 
schools.  In  making  courses  of  study  for  rural  schools  it 
must  be  remembered  that  farming  is  still  a  trade,  or  rather 
a  combination  of  many  whole  and  complex  trades,  if,  in- 
deed, it  should  not  be  called  a  learned  profession,  and  not  a 
single,  simple  process  or  a  series  of  such  processes,  as  is  the 
occupation  of  many  people  in  the  industrial  life  of  the  city. 
Little  or  nothing  on  the  farm  and  in  the  farm  home  can  be 


A  brooder  and  laying  house,  Berks  County,  Pa. 


Poultry  club  work  of  Pennsylvania  State  College 


A  home-made  brooder 
"The  New  Spirit"  at  work  in  rural  Pennsylvania 


THE   AMERICAN  RURAL   SCHOOL  4 1 

done  by  rule  of  thumb.  The  freedom  of  adjustment  that 
comes  only  from  a  mastery  of  fundamental  principles  is  ab- 
solutely necessary.  The  independent  farmer  must  have  the 
power  of  self-guidance  under  complex  and  constantly  chang- 
ing conditions.  To  make  sure  that  principles  are  under- 
stood and  flexible  in  their  use  and  that  they  have  real  con- 
tent, they  must  be  constantly  tested  in  practical  applica- 
tion. Therefore  rural  school  and  farm  and  home  must  be- 
come as  nearly  as  possible  one  for  the  education  of  the 
farmer's  boy  and  girl,  and  each  should  be  intelligent  about 
and  sympathetic  with  the  other  in  a  way  and  to  a  degree 
now  seldom  found. 

Professional  Teachers. — But  no  policy  of  support,  con- 
trol, and  administration  however  wise,  and  no  courses  of 
study  however  thorough  and  logical,  may  be  expected  to 
accomplish  much  without  competent  teachers.  Teachers 
make  the  schools  and  they  are  larger  factors  in  the  making 
of  rural  schools  than  they  can  be  under  modern  conditions 
in  the  making  of  urban  schools.  The  teacher  of  a  grade  or 
of  a  subject  in  a  city  school  is  a  part  of  a  large  and  more  or 
less  efficient  machine,  which,  once  started,  continues  largely 
by  its  own  momentum.  Her  tasks  are  definite  and  narrowly 
limited.  It  is  quite  otherwise  with  the  teacher  in  the  small 
country  school  of  one,  two,  or  three  teachers.  Here  the  ma- 
chinery is  light  and  loosely  put  together,  if  indeed  there 
can  be  said  to  be  any  machinery  at  all.  The  teacher's  tasks 
are  large  and  indefinite.  There  are  opportunity  and  need  for 
men  of  power  of  initiative  and  self-guidance.  Personality, 
scholarship,  professional  knowledge,  and  the  skill  which 
comes  from  intelligent  experience  count  for  more  in  the 
country  school  than  they  can  in  the  city  school.  More  care- 
ful consideration  needs  to  be  given  to  the  selection  of  teach- 
ers in  the  rural  schools  and  to  schools  in  which  to  prepare 
them  for  their  work. 

We  may  not  hope  to  offer  to  all  children  even  approxi- 
mately equal  opportunities  for  education  nor  to  obtain  any- 


42  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

thing  like  satisfactory  returns  from  our  investments  of 
money,  time,  and  interest  in  our  public  schools  until  in  all 
the  States  we  shall  have  higher  and  more  nearly  uniform 
standards  of  qualification  for  teachers,  which  standards  for 
teachers  in  rural  schools  must  include  a  good  beginning  at 
least  in  knowledge  of  rural  life,  rural  occupations,  and  rural 
economics.  At  present  we  are  giving  some  kind  of  profes- 
sional preparation  to  only  a  small  per  cent  of  those  who 
are  to  become  teachers  in  the  rural  schools,  and  only  in  a 
few  normal  schools  does  this  preparation  include  even  a 
good  beginning  in  those  things  which  pertain  especially  to 
the  work  of  the  rural  schools.  I  have  already  stated  that 
in  a  study  of  rural  teachers  in  55  typical  counties,  repre- 
senting all  the  States  of  the  Union,  Foght  found  that  only 
3.4  per  cent  of  the  2,941  teachers  replying  to  the  questions 
sent  to  6,000  teachers  were  graduates  of  any  normal  school, 
that  only  26.5  had  attended  normal  schools  at  all,  and  that 
only  20  teachers  out  of  the  whole  number  had  attended 
schools  giving  special  preparation  for  rural  school  work. 
For  many  years  we  have  maintained  normal  schools  at  the 
cost  of  taxes  paid  by  all  the  people  in  country  and  city 
alike,  but  in  most  States  almost  all  the  graduates  of  these 
schools  have  found  places  as  teachers  in  city  schools  and 
the  country  schools  have  been  benefited  very  little.  If 
graduation  from  college  with  some  work  in  courses  in  edu- 
cation or  from  public  or  private  normal  schools  or  from 
high  schools  with  teacher-training  courses  be  accounted  the 
minimum  adequate  preparation  for  teaching — and  cer- 
tainly nothing  less  should  be  so  accounted — then  we  are  not 
preparing  anything  like  a  sufficient  number  of  teachers  to 
meet  the  yearly  demands  for  new  teachers  in  the  public 
schools.  In  191 2-13  there  were  in  such  schools  and  courses 
as  I  have  named  approximately  135,000  students,  about 
28,000  of  whom  graduated  in  the  spring  of  that  year.  In 
the  summer  and  fall  of  191 3  more  than  100,000  new  teach- 
ers were  needed  in  the  public  schools  alone.    If  all  these 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL  SCHOOL  43 

graduates  of  the  spring  had  begun  teaching  in  the  fall,  more 
than  60,000  places  would  have  remained  to  be  filled  by  new 
teachers  without  the  minimum  of  preparation  indicated  by 
the  fact  of  graduation  from  a  school  of  one  of  these  kinds. 

I  must  be  permitted  to  enter  here  a  firm  protest  against 
any  idea  that  we  are  to  be  content  that  teachers  may  con- 
tinue to  be  admitted  to  work  in  the  rural  schools  with  such 
meagre  academic  and  professional  preparation  as  may  be 
gained  in  high  schools  of  four  years  with  a  little  time  given 
in  the  fourth  year  to  the  history  of  education,  psychology, 
methods  of  teaching,  and  school  management.  That  such 
preparation  may  be  better  than  most  rural  teachers  now 
have  I  admit,  but  I  have  already  called  attention  to  the  fact 
that  the  rural  teachers  have  more  difficult  tasks  to  perform 
and  therefore  need  more  thorough  and  comprehensive  prep- 
aration than  city  teachers.  The  training  courses  in  high 
schools  and  county  normal  schools  may  be  necessary  as 
temporary  makeshifts  and  as  stepping-stones  to  something 
better,  but  to  accept  them  as  permanent  means  of  preparing 
rural  teachers  would  be  to  condemn  forever  the  rural  schools 
to  inefficiency  and  rural  life  to  poverty  and  futility.  If  the 
American  people  are  in  earnest  about  education  and  about 
the  betterment  of  country  life,  they  must  demand  of  rural 
teachers  higher  standards  of  preparation  and  see  to  it  that 
schools  with  adequate  standards  and  appropriate  courses  of 
instruction  are  maintained  in  sufficient  numbers  for  their 
preparation.  I  know  of  no  important  culture  country 
whose  teachers  are  so  poorly  prepared  for  their  work  as  are 
the  majority  of  rural  teachers  in  most  of  our  States. 

Consolidation  of  Schools. — But  even  with  all  teachers 
prepared  reasonably  well  for  their  work  the  rural  schools 
must  continue  to  be  inefficient  and  unsatisfactory  if  most 
schools  are  to  continue  to  be  one-teacher  schools  and  if 
teachers  are  to  continue  to  change  from  place  to  place  as 
they  now  do.  No  teacher  can  teach  well  twenty-five  chil- 
dren of  all  ages  and  of  all  grades  of  advancement  from  the 


44  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

first  grade  to  the  high  school.  Thirty-five  classes  a  day 
with  a  teaching  time  for  each  class  of  from  four  to  twelve 
minutes  will  continue  to  baffle  the  skill  of  the  best.  Even 
if  by  skilful  combination  the  number  of  classes  in  such  schools 
should  be  reduced  to  twenty,  as  I  believe  they  may  in  most 
schools,  the  number  would  still  be  too  large. 

The  coming  and  going  of  teachers,  reducing  their  work 
to  a  kind  of  day  labor,  is  still  more  detrimental  to  the  work 
of  the  schools.  For  successful  teaching  much  more  is  neces- 
sary than  knowledge  of  subjects  taught  and  of  methods  and 
devices  of  teaching  and  school  management.  Teachers 
must  know  something  of  the  powers,  capacities,  tendencies, 
weakness,  and  strength  of  the  children  they  teach.  Such 
knowledge  implies  a  knowledge  of  their  parentage.  They 
must  know  something  of  their  experiences  in  the  home,  in 
the  field,  in  the  shop,  at  work  and  at  play,  and  in  associa- 
tion with  kindred  and  friends,  else  they  will  not  know  how 
to  use  the  results  of  these  vital  experiences  as  the  raw  ma- 
terial of  lessons  to  be  learned  in  school.  They  must  know 
something  of  the  contemporary  home  life  of  the  children, 
their  occupations  and  interests  and  their  relations  to  their 
parents,  else  they  will  not  be  able  to  bring  about  that  close 
co-operation  between  school  and  home  and  the  unity  of 
school  and  home  interests  without  which  the  work  of  the 
school  cannot  be  made  to  take  hold  on  the  lives  of  the  chil- 
dren. They  must  know  the  details  of  the  work  which  the 
children  have  done  in  the  lower  grades  that  they  may  use 
the  knowledge  gained  in  these  grades  as  the  basis  of  new 
lessons  to  be  learned,  and  that  the  children  may  learn  and 
interpret  the  new  in  terms  of  the  old  and  dovetail  the  one 
into  the  other  in  such  a  way  as  to  make  the  work  of  one 
year  a  development  and  continuation  of  that  of  previous 
years.  They  must  know  something  of  the  inner  life  of  the 
children,  of  their  ideals,  hopes,  and  dreams  of  the  future,  else 
they  will  be  unable  to  make  the  lessons  of  the  school  take 
hold  on  these,  modifying  them  and  being  enriched  by  them 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL  SCHOOL  45 

as  they  must  be  before  the  school,  its  lessons,  and  its  dis- 
ciplines can  be  made  to  project  themselves  into  the  future 
and  take  hold  on  life  as  they  should,  and  as  they  must  be- 
fore they  can  become  fruitful  in  deeds,  in  life,  and  in  char- 
acter. 


III.    Suggestions  for  Improving  Such  Conditions 
Through  Consolidation 

As  a  means  of  bringing  about  such  a  consolidation  of 
schools  as  will  obviate  the  necessity  of  one  teacher  attempt- 
ing to  teach  children  in  all  the  grades  of  the  elementary 
school  and  at  the  same  time  secure  a  longer  stay  of  com- 
petent teachers  in  the  same  schools  together  with  many  other 
desirable  improvements  not  otherwise  possible,  I  make  the 
following  suggestions: 

1.  That  in  all  States  the  unit  jor  school  administration 
be  made  as  large  as  possible — the  town  in  the  New  England 
States,  the  county  or  parish  in  most  other  States — so  as  to 
permit  the  greatest  possible  freedom  in  forming  single-school 
districts  and  adjusting  their  boundaries  to  geographic  fea- 
tures and  the  outlines  of  settlements,  and  to  insure  to  all 
schools  of  the  township  or  county  equally  adequate  support. 

2.  That  the  school  laws  of  all  States  should  make  it  easy 
for  town  and  county  boards  of  education  to  co-operate  in 
forming  union  districts  of  territory  from  two  or  more  town- 
ships or  counties  and  in  establishing,  maintaining,  controll- 
ing, and  supervising  schools  in  them  when  this  is  necessary 
to  the  best  interests  of  the  people. 

3.  That  careful  surveys  be  made  of  the  territory  of  all 
school-administration  units  and  that  on  the  basis  of  these 
surveys  they  be  divided  into  school  districts  of  from  ten 
to  fifteen  square  miles  each,  the  exact  size  and  shape  of  any 
district  depending  on  physical  features,  location  and  char- 
acter of  roads,  means  of  transportation,  density  of  popula- 
tion, trade  centre,  and  other  conditions.    Where  roads  are 


46  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

numerous,  good,  and  convergent,  the  district  may  well  be 
larger  than  where  they  are  few,  bad,  and  parallel  or  per- 
pendicular to  each  other.  Twelve  square  miles,  three  by 
four  or  three  and  a  half  miles  square,  will  probably  be  a 
good  average  in  two-thirds  of  the  towns  and  counties  of  the 
country.  The  Bureau  of  Education  is  now  making  a  care- 
ful and  exhaustive  study  of  the  possibilities  of  organization 
on  this  basis.  It  is  already  apparent  that  in  most  counties 
the  number  of  schools  may  be  reduced  by  one-half,  in  many 
by  two-thirds  or  three-fourths,  and  in  some  by  as  much  as 
four-fifths  or  five-sixths.  In  some  counties  of  Pennsylvania 
and  probably  of  other  States  as  many  as  eight  one-teacher 
schools  might  be  brought  together  in  a  territory  of  this  size. 

4.  That  at  the  most  suitable  and  accessible  place  in  each 
consolidated  district  a  good  schoolhouse  be  built,  attractive, 
comfortable,  and  sanitary,  with  classrooms,  laboratories, 
and  library  equipped  for  the  work  which  such  a  rural  school 
should  do,  and  an  assembly-hall  large  enough,  not  only  to 
seat  comfortably  at  one  time  all  the  pupils  of  the  school, 
but  also  to  serve  as  a  meeting-place  for  the  people  of  the 
school  district. 

5.  That  on  the  school  grounds  a  house  be  built  for  a 
home  for  the  principal  and  possibly  also  for  other  teachers. 
This  house  should  not  be  expensive,  but  neat  and  attrac- 
tive, a  model  for  the  community,  such  a  house  as  any  thrifty 
farmer  with  good  taste  might  hope  to  build  for  himself. 

6.  That  as  a  part  of  the  equipment  of  the  school  there 
should  be  a  small  farm,  from  four  to  five  acres  or  more  if  in 
a  village  or  densely  populated  community,  and  from  twenty- 
five  to  fifty  acres  or  more  if  in  the  open  country.  The  prin- 
cipal of  the  school  should  be  required  to  live  in  the  prin- 
cipal's home,  keep  it  as  a  model  home  for  the  community, 
and  cultivate  the  farm  as  a  model  farm,  with  garden,  or- 
chard, poultry-yard,  small  dairy,  and  whatever  else  should 
be  found  on  a  well-conducted,  well-tilled  farm  in  that  com- 
munity.   He  should  put  himself  into  close  contact  with  the 


THE  AMERICAN  RURAL   SCHOOL  47 

agricultural  college  and  agricultural  experiment  station  of 
his  State^  the  departments  of  agriculture  of  State  and  na- 
tion, farm-demonstration  agents,  and  other  similar  agencies, 
and  it  should  be  made  their  duty  to  help  him  in  every  way 
possible.  The  use  of  the  house  and  the  products  of  the 
farm  should  be  given  the  principal  as  a  part  of  his  salary  in 
addition  to  the  salary  paid  in  money. 

7.  That  after  a  satisfactory  trial  of  a  year  or  two  a 
contract  should  be  made  with  the  principal  for  life  or  good 
behavior,  or  at  least  for  a  long  term  of  years. 

8.  That  the  school  sessions  be  adapted  to  the  industrial 
needs  and  climatic  conditions  of  the  district.  It  is  not 
necessary  that  primary  and  advanced  pupils  attend  at  the 
same  time.  In  the  North  and  in  mountainous  sections  pri- 
mary children  should  attend  school  in  the  spring,  summer, 
and  fall. 

The  Consolidated-School  Centre. — In  this  way  it  will  be 
possible  to  get  and  keep  in  the  schools  men  of  first-class  abil- 
ity, competent  to  teach  children  and  to  become  leaders  in 
their  communities.  The  principal  of  a  country  school 
should  know  country  life.  A  large  part  of  country  life  has 
to  do  with  the  cultivation  and  care  of  the  farm.  The  best 
test  of  knowledge  here  as  elsewhere  is  the  ability  to  do.  The 
principal  of  a  country  school  in  a  farming  community  should 
be  able  to  cultivate  and  care  for  a  small  farm  better  than 
any  other  man  in  the  community  or  at  least  as  well.  It 
may  be  true  that  ^Hhose  who  can,  do;  and  those  who  can^t, 
teach,"  but  it  should  noi  be  so.  It  must  not  be  so  if  the 
teacher  is  to  do  the  work  and  have  the  influence  in  the  com- 
munity that  he  should. 

The  school-farm  will,  of  course,  serve  as  a  demonstra- 
tion farm  for  the  district,  with  the  principal  of  the  school, 
to  some  extent  at  least,  as  a  farm-demonstration  agent,  di- 
recting the  home  work  of  boys  and  advising  the  men  as  to 
their  work  and  the  whole  community  in  many  important 
matters  of  citizenship  and  life. 


48  THE  CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

I  am  assuming  that  the  principal  of  the  consolidated 
country  school  will  be  a  man.  As  a  rule,  it  should  be  so. 
In  every  school  attended  by  large  boys  there  should  be  at 
least  one  man;  other  teachers  may  well  be  women. 

The  increased  prosperity  and  wealth  that  would  come  to 
any  community  with  such  a  school  as  would  be  possible  un- 
der the  plan  suggested  would  soon  enable  it  to  pay  sufficient 
salaries  to  obtain  the  services  of  men  and  women  of  the  best 
native  ability,  education,  training,  and  skill.  Any  man 
who  ought  to  be  allowed  to  teach  as  the  principal  of  a 
country  school  in  a  farming  community  can  make  the  use 
of  such  a  home  and  school-farm  worth  to  him  as  much  or 
more  than  the  money  salary  now  paid  to  rural-school  prin- 
cipals anywhere  in  America.  Under  the  plan  suggested  the 
principal's  wife  might  in  many  instances  become  the  leader 
of  the  social  life  of  the  community  and  help  in  making  the 
teacher's  home  and  the  school  a  social  centre.  She  might 
also  assist  the  women  teachers  in  extending  the  school  work 
to  the  homes  of  the  district,  making  the  work  and  the  care 
of  the  homes  more  intelligent  and  tying  the  women  and 
their  homes  to  the  school  as  the  principal  would  tie  the 
men  and  their  farms. 

The  plan  here  suggested  would  not  prove  very  costly. 
If  bonds  were  issued  to  pay  the  first  cost  of  house  and  land, 
by  the  time  the  bonds  matured  the  increase  in  the  value  of 
the  land  would  in  most  communities  amount  to  as  much  as 
its  first  cost  and  the  community  would  have  at  a  compara- 
tively small  cost  property  of  a  much  greater  permanent 
value. 

After  a  long  and  careful  study  of  the  problems  of  the 
rural  schools  I  see  no  other  way  in  which  any  thoroughgoing 
permanent  improvement  may  be  wrought  out  for  our  rural 
schools  in  most  parts  of  the  country.  But  this  way  is  clear 
and  practicable  and  the  principles  involved  are  not  untried 
in  this  country  and  elsewhere.  Its  general  adoption  would 
increase  the  value  and  efficiency  of  the  American  rural 


THE  AMERICAN   RURAL   SCHOOL  49 

school  more  than  we  can  now  understand.  Anything  that 
will  add  in  even  a  small  degree  to  their  effectiveness  is  worthy 
of  careful  consideration  and  patient  trial. 


PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  To  what  extent  has  consolidation  been  accomplished  in  your 

home  State? 

2.  What  per  cent  of  these  schools  are  simply  graded  schools  in  the 

country  without  the  other  features  necessary  to  make  them  first- 
class  ruralized  schools  ? 

3.  What  per  cent  of  the  one-room  schools  in  your  State  have  mod- 

ern school  plants  with  trained  teachers  and  satisfactory  rural 
courses  of  study  ? 

4.  What  changes,  if  any,  would  be  necessary  to  establish  the  county- 

unit  system  of  school  administration  in  your  State  ? 

5.  What  are  some  of  the  things  that  rural  pupils  most  need  to  learn 

in  school? 

6.  Can  these  well  be  provided  economically  in  single-room  schools? 

7.  What  suggestions  are  given  in  the  chapter  for  securing  satisfac- 

tory consolidation? 

8.  How  are  bonds  obtained  for  building  consolidated  schools  in  your 

State? 

9.  How  much  money  would  be  available  for  a  consolidated  school  if 

the  appropriation  for  each  child  equalled  ex-President  Eliot's 
standard  of  the  amount  spent  for  its  food  and  clothing? 
[Q.  How  can  such  expenditures  be  justified  in  the  minds  of  country 
people?  What  per  cent  of  this  sum  should  be  paid  by  the 
consolidated-school  community,  the  coimty,  the  State,  and  the 
nation  ? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Recent  reports  of  county  and  State  superintendents  of  public 

schools  and  the  United  States  Bureau  of  Education. 

2.  Surveys  of  rural  schools  and  country  life. 

3.  Carney — "Country  Life  and  the  Country  School."    Row,  Peter- 

son &  Co. 

4.  Foght— "The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work."    Macmillan. 

5.  Arp — "Rural  Education  and  the  Consolidated  School."     World 

Book  Co. 

6.  Cubberley — "Rural  Life  and  Education."    Houghton,  Mifflin  Co. 


50  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

7.  Hart — "Educational  Resources  of  Village  and  Rural  Communi- 

ties."    Macmillan. 

8.  Vogt — "Rural  Sociology."    Appleton. 

9.  Field  and  Nearing — "Community  Civics."     Macmillan. 
10.  Smith — "Educational  Sociology."    Houghton,  Miflflin  Co. 


SOME  TYPICAL  SURVEYS 

A.  State  surveys  by  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education: 

1.  Educational  survey  of  Wyoming. 

2.  Educational  conditions  in  Arizona. 

3.  Educational  survey  of  Tennessee. 

4.  Educational  survey  of  the  schools  of  South  Dakota.  . 

B.  Self  surveys  by  States: 

1.  Minnesota,  State  Department  of  Public  Instruction. 

2.  Wisconsin,  State  Department  of  Public  Instruction. 

3.  Missouri,  State  Department  of  Public  Instruction. 

4.  Montana,  State  Department  of  Public  Instruction. 

5.  Pennsylvania,  State  Department  of  Public  Instruction. 

C.  By  boards  and  bureaus: 

1.  Public  Education  in  Maryland,  by  the  General  Education 

Board,  New  York. 

2.  Surveys  of  a  number  of  rural  counties  by  the  Presbyterian 

Board,  New  York. 

3.  Sanitary  survey  of  Porter  County,  Indiana,  and   others, 

United  States  Public  Health  Service. 

D.  By  universities: 

1.  Survey  of  Lane  County,  Oregon. 

2.  Survey  of  a  county  in  California,  by  Williams,  published  by 

the  United  States  Bureau  of  Education. 


CHAPTER  III 
COMMUNITY  ORGANIZATION  AND   CONSOLIDATION 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  Describe  some  rural  co-operative  enterprise,  such  as  a  creamery, 

elevator,  or  store,  of  which  you  have  knowledge. 

2.  What  has  led  to  these  " getting- together "  movements? 

3.  Why  are  not  more  of  these  organizations  established? 

4.  What  forces  have  favored  and  hindered  such  co-operation? 

5.  Do  the  best  farmers  to-day  attempt  to  ''raise  all  they  need  for  the 

family"  as  in  1850?    Why? 

6.  In  what  ways  does  specialization  in  farming  lead  to  greater  world- 

wide connections? 

7.  How  does  the  consolidated  school  enlarge  the  acquaintance  unit 

of  a  rural  community? 

8.  Why  do  farmers  so  frequently  "move  to  town"? 

9.  Is  farm  tenantry  a  good  or  bad  thing  socially? 

10.  In  what  ways  are  the  interest  of  the  farmers  and  the  rural  village 
trading-centre  identical  ? 

As  has  been  ably  set  forth  in  the  preceding  chapter,  the 
community  gives  character  to  country  life  in  our  time. 
This  is  another  name  for  the  organized  neighborhood. 
The  name  describes  the  people  with  their  properties  and 
institutions  who  live  within  easy  reach  of  one  another  in 
the  country.  The  community  is  the  habitat  of  a  farm  fam- 
ily. In  it  personal  acquaintance  takes  on  a  very  intimate 
form  and  verifies  personal  character.  In  the  country  com- 
munity everybody  is  known  to  everybody  else.  The  weak 
are  known  to  be  weak;  the  honest  are  known  to  be  honest. 
The  reason  for  this  is  in  the  fact  that  those  who  farm  can- 
not go  far  from  home,  and  must  return  to  the  farm  prac- 
tically every  night.     Therefore,   acquaintance  with  those 

SI 


52  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

near  at  home  is  very  close.  With  persons  outside  the  limits 
of  the  home  community  acquaintance  is  scanty.  The  com- 
munity in  the  country  intensifies  acquaintance  but  limits  it. 
Upon  this  acquaintance  unit  are  based  all  the  new  social 
institutions  of  rural  life.  The  co-operative  credit  unions 
depend  upon  personal  acquaintance  for  their  security. 
The  co-operative  creameries  and  grain-elevators  could  not 
admit  to  membership  men  not  known  well  to  their  fellow 
members.  Likewise  consolidated  schools  take  a  district  as 
large  as  the  circle  of  personal  acquaintance  and  co-operation 
activity  for  their  legislative  boundaries.  Federated  churches 
assemble  all  the  people  who  can  attend  their  services  by  a 
convenient  team-haul  or  automobile-ride. 

I.     Necessity  at  Work 

Economic  forces  are  moulding  anew  the  social  form  of 
country  life.  The  chief  of  these  forces  are  in  the  city  which 
acts  as  an  assembly  of  people  who  do  not  produce  raw  ma- 
terials. The  city  depends  for  the  supply  of  such  materials 
upon  the  people  in  the  country,  at  the  same  time  so  adding 
to  the  value  of  these  products  as  to  create  a  demand  for  the 
finished  articles  such  that  even  the  farmer  must  buy  of 
the  city. 

It  must  not  be  lost  to  sight  that  the  city  is  the  central 
fact  or  expression  of  the  forces  which  to-day  mould  country 
life.  The  necessity  which  forces  country  people,  prone  to 
household  forms  of  existence,  to  organize  their  households 
into  communities  is  imposed  by  the  cities. 

The  World  Market. — The  second  fact  which  is  to-day 
remodelling  the  form  of  the  country  community  is  the  inter- 
national character  of  the  market.  This  is  often  expressed 
in  the  term  ''the  world  market."  Of  this  world  market  the 
cities  are  the  centres,  but  the  remotest  farmhouse  comes  to 
that  world  market  as  a  customer.  Few  or  none  are  the 
households    in    mountain-coves    where    to-day    men   wear 


COMMUNITY  ORGANIZATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION      53 

homespun.  Few  are  the  renters  or  "croppers"  who  do  not 
''live  out  of  a  store."  I  have  seen  the  transformation  in 
remote  settlements  where  a  self-sufficing  industry  prevailed 
twenty-five  years  ago.  To-day  these  people  are  so  eager 
for  the  cash  with  which  to  buy  ''store-clothes"  that  the 
man  of  the  house,  father  often  of  six  to  ten  children  before 
he  is  forty,  journeys  many  miles  to  seek  employment  upon 
railroad  or  lumber  enterprises  in  order  that  he  may,  by 
working  most  of  the  weeks  of  the  year  in  a  camp,  enable  his 
children  to  wear  what  others  wear  and  eat  and  enjoy  what 
others  have.  The  opulence  and  cheapness  of  the  city  mar- 
kets, which  are  furnished  with  all  that  England  or  China 
produces,  tempt  every  member  of  a  self-sufficing  household 
to  become  a  wage-earner  and  so  to  become  a  consumer  of 
other  men's  and  of  other  nations'  goods. 

Communication  and  Transportation. — Transportation  is 
another  name  for  a  force  which,  with  the  power  of  necessity, 
irresistibly  moulds  the  social  life  of  the  country  and  makes  it 
over  into  the  community  form.  The  goods,  the  people,  and 
the  news  from  all  the  world  are  brought  into  every  region. 
Country  people  come  to  see  that  they  must  associate  them- 
selves into  community  organization  in  order  to  secure  and 
to  enjoy  what  the  world  sends.  A  good  illustration  of  this 
use  of  the  neighborhood  form  is  in  the  Chautauqua  enter- 
tainment, to  which  country  people  are  devoted.  Most  of 
these  organizations  for  the  hearing  and  seeing  of  celeb- 
rities, lecturers,  and  entertainers  are  village  or  open-coun- 
try affairs.  The  system  has  had  to  accommodate  itself  to 
the  community  form.  The  local  Chautauqua  is  an  illus- 
tration of  the  social  form  country  life  takes  in  utilizing 
world  ideas  and  enjoyments.  The  consolidated  school  is  a 
form  of  community  organization  made  necessary  by  the  de- 
sire of  country  people  to  learn  in  the  world  school.  Of  all  these 
forces  the  city  is  the  centre  and  the  expression. 


54  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

II.     Historical  Review 

Household  organization  is  a  permanent  form  of  country 
living.  It  is  older  than  America — as  old  as  Deuteronomy. 
When  there  were  no  cities  in  America  the  household  was 
self-sufficing.  Socially  and  economically  it  maintained  it- 
self, depending  upon  other  households  only  as  convenience 
or  as  exigency  demanded.  Co-operation  was  for  emergen- 
cies only.  What  was  needed  was  made  on  the  premises. 
Stores  were  mostly  places  of  exchange  of  neighborhood  goods. 
Schools  were  one- teacher  supplements  of  the  home  learning; 
for  the  parents  considered  themselves  the  proper  and  suffi- 
cient teachers  of  their  children.  Churches  were  places  of 
meeting,  often  irregularly  used,  in  which  religious  services 
were  supplementary  to  those  of  the  family.  Their  doctrine 
was  patriarchal,  a  family  interpretation  of  Christianity. 
Such  social  life  is  still  somewhat  common.  But  wherever 
the  household  rules  the  countryside  it  indicates  that  the 
city  and  the  world  market  have  not  yet  effected  the  reor- 
ganization which  is  inevitably  and  rapidly  approaching. 

Before  1870  household  farming  was  the  rule.  There  was 
no  other  form  of  social  organization  except  that  which,  like 
the  one- teacher  school,  supplemented  the  household.  Now 
the  emergence  of  determining  institutions  of  a  community  sort 
signifies  that  a  new  era  has  come  in  American  country  life. 

Solitary  Farming. — When  free  land  in  an  earlier  day 
affected  vitally  the  organization  of  American  life,  it  created 
the  individualistic  type  of  person,  which  has  always  in 
American  history  exerted  a  great  influence.  Land  so  free 
that  it  was  of  no  value  intoxicated  the  children  of  European 
serfs  and  bondsmen  and  almost  set  them  mad  with  the 
spirit  of  independence.  They  began  to  idealize  personality, 
to  magnify  the  value  of  individual  opinion,  of  private  prop- 
erty, and  to  regard  individual  freedom  as  an  ultimate  ideal 
instead  of  a  means  to  spiritual  and  social  ends.  Yet  in- 
dividualists did  not  forswear  the  world.    They  did  not  be- 


COMMUNITY  ORGANIZATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION      55 

come  monks  or  nuns.  Hermits  and  individualists  are  not 
alike,  but  most  unlike.  And  as  American  individualists  live 
very  much  in  society  there  have  been  many  clashes  and 
conflicts  between  their  theories  of  the  freedom  of  the  in- 
dividual will  and  the  obligations  of  an  organized  society. 
Yet  that  earlier  time  has  made  in  our  history  an  indelible 
impression,  contributing  to  our  philosophy,  religion,  and 
education  the  individualistic  elements  which  idealized  the 
loneliness  and  isolation  of  the  wilderness  life. 

The  Migrant  Farmer. — When  the  homesteads  were 
given  away — free  land  offered  in  a  legalized  form — to  those 
who  had  come  to  set  value  upon  land,  we  find  arising  in 
America  a  new  social  type,  the  migrating  farmer.  Migra- 
tion, especially  between  1870  and  1890,  has  had  lasting  ef- 
fects upon  American  country  people.  Families  went  west- 
ward, leaving  behind  many  of  the  social  elements  of  life, 
and  founded  neighborhoods  without  traditions,  churches 
without  creeds,  schools  without  culture,  and  industries 
without  reserves  of  capital.  The  history  of  the  Western 
States  is  only  now  emerging  from  the  period  wherein  the 
effects  of  an  artificially  formalized  migration  which  at- 
tempted in  twenty  years  to  set  up  in  uniform  ways  over  all 
our  domain  the  social  culture  based  upon  farming  that  the 
Eastern  States  had  matured  in  the  slow  growth  of  two  hun- 
dred years.  Often  the  social  forms  are  there,  but  the  value 
of  them  is  absent.  The  homesteading  process  degenerated 
into  a  speculation  in  land,  in  timber,  and  in  minerals,  and 
this  has  often  debauched  the  government's  high  purpose. 
The  migratory  social  forms  are  temporary,  as  the  exploita- 
tion which  followed  the  migration  is  to  be  temporary.  For 
our  present  purpose  it  is  enough  to  record  the  force  of  the 
migration  in  its  effects  upon  such  institutions  as  the  school 
and  the  church.  They  have  not  been  advanced  nor  per- 
fected by  the  period,  with  its  artificial  *' homesteading.'' 
The  improvement  of  the  schools  has  come  from  the  older 
settlement,  not  from  the  newer. 


56  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

The  Exploiters  of  Land. — There  followed  the  year  1890 
a  period  of  exploitation  of  farm  values  which  produced 
social  forms  not  before  seen  in  America.  The  retired  farmer 
appeared  first  in  the  Middle  West,  having  sold  his  homestead 
in  order  to  secure  in  cash  the  land  values  which  he  had  not 
earned.  Securing  perhaps  $100  per  acre  for  lands  which  he 
had  received  free  from  the  government,  he  came  to  live  in 
town  with  that  freedom  from  social  obligation  which  one 
might  expect  in  a  man  who  could  regard  land  bestowed  by 
the  State  as  a  private  possession.  The  retired  farmer  has 
a  bad  record,  for  his  situation  has  been  one  of  slavery  to 
hostile  necessities.  He  has  ever  been  known  as  the  foe  of 
all  community  progress.  Succeeding  him  has  come  the 
landlord,  a  type  different  only  in  his  holding  his  lands  for  a 
bigger  rise  in  price  instead  of  selling.  The  American  farm 
landlord  has  usually  been  an  absentee,  living  in  town  away 
from  his  farm,  and  a  social  absentee,  in  that  he  has  insulated 
himself  from  responsibility  for  the  social  improvements 
which  his  properties  were  expected  to  support.  We  have, 
for  example,  known  owners  of  five-thousand-acre  tracts  in 
Illinois  and  in  Texas  to  command  their  tenants,  on  penalty 
of  losing  their  leases,  to  vote  against  school  consolidation. 

The  children  of  tenants  really  require  a  better  school 
than  the  children  of  owners,  because  their  home  resources 
are  more  meagre,  but  the  American  landlord,  bound  by  no 
legal  requirements,  sense  of  social  responsibility,  nor  social 
usages,  such  as  usually  determine  the  conduct  of  European 
landlords,  has  persistently  declined  to  improve  the  local 
school,  church,  or  playground.  Being  an  exploiter,  he  has 
regarded  only  the  financial  advantage  of  his  position.  Be- 
ing a  speculator,  he  is  waiting  for  the  cash  gains  of  increased 
land  prices,  not  for  the  more  remote  but  sound  economic  re- 
wards of  more  intelligent  agriculture. 

The  Tenure  of  Land. — The  farm  tenant,  or  "renter,"  as 
he  is  usually  called  with  fine  precision,  is  *4n  a  worse  con- 
dition than  that  of  any  European  tenant.''     He  has,  as  a 


COMMUNITY  ORGANIZATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION      57 

rule,  a  lease  of  only  one  year.  He  can  secure  no  better, 
because  the  landlord  expects  to  sell  and  will  not  encumber 
the  property.  The  tenant  usually  desires  no  longer  lease, 
because  he  hopes  to  "skin  the  land,"  and  actually  does  often 
get  a  better  reward  from  the  year's  work  than  the  landlord 
receives.  The  land,  which  is  essentially  an  asset  of  society 
and  of  the  community,  has  to  pay  the  costs  of  this  expensive 
exploiting  process.  It  is  true  that  not  all  landlords  nor  all 
tenants  are  as  bad  as  the  type,  but  the  situation  is  unpro- 
tected by  legal  safeguards,  and  the  pressure  of  economic 
motive  works  out  just  about  as  we  have  described.  In 
counties  of  the  Middle  Western  States,  in  which  tenancy 
rises  as  high  as  fifty,  or  even  seventy,  per  cent  of  the  popula- 
tion, the  social  improvement  of  the  community  is  retarded 
while  financial  gains  are  being  made.  The  means  of  money- 
making  are  provided  while  the  schools  and  roads  are  left 
by  the  local  authorities  just  where  they  were  in  the  time 
when  the  farm  household  was  self-sufficing.  Some  money 
is  made  in  the  present  at  the  expense  of  present  and  future 
character  and  social  efficiency.    Money  eclipses  men. 

III.    Organized  Society  in  Control 

Social  control  has  come  to  the  farm.  This  control  is  en- 
forced not  by  the  State  but  by  the  city,  the  railway,  and  the 
market.  The  State  has  little  direct  control  over  the  farmer. 
In  the  city,  policemen  have  much  to  say  about  the  daily 
conduct  of  affairs;  but  in  the  country,  social  control,  not  a 
whit  less  potent,  is  exerted  by  international  prices  of  wheat 
or  beef,  by  railway  and  mail  influences,  and  by  the  compact 
will  of  the  masses  of  consumers  whom  "the  farmer  feeds." 
The  husbandman  has  come  into  existence  under  these  con- 
ditions, that  is,  the  farmer  who  farms  according  to  social 
control.  He  is  characterized  by  two  new  elements,  not  in 
other  types  of  countryman  observed:  he  co-operates  and  he 
uses  scientific  methods. 


5$  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Wherever  husbandry  appears  there  are  found  colleges  of 
agriculture  and  schools  capable  of  carrying  into  the  local 
community  the  teachings  of  the  laboratory  and  of  the  ex- 
perimental farm.  Husbandry  always  organizes  in  the  form 
of  such  co-operative  enterprises  as  grain-elevators,  cream- 
eries, egg-gathering  associations,  and  credit  associations. 
These  educational  and  business  forms  are  expressions  of  the 
community.  They  are  always  of  the  size  of  the  commu- 
nity. They  depend  upon  one  another.  Without  the  trained 
minds  developed  by  and  in  the  consolidated-school  district, 
co-operation  cannot  endure.  Without  the  distributed  profits 
which  co-operation  alone  can  assure,  better  education  will 
be  impossible. 

Temporary  and  Permanent  Forms. — The  household  and 
the  community  are  permanent  forms.  The  individualist, 
the  migrant,  and  the  exploiter  are  temporary;  they  may  ap- 
pear and  reappear  and  constitute  an  always  present  fringe, 
but  these  are  farmers  in  the  way  of  becoming  something 
else.  The  country  must  depend  upon  households  to  till  the 
soil.  The  household  group  is  God's  plough  for  breaking  the 
sod  of  nature  and  reducing  chaos  to  fertility.  Families 
alone  can  endure  in  the  country.  Persons  are  nothing  in 
the  contest  with  nature;  the  household  group  is  everything 
victorious,  fruitful,  productive.  The  individuaHst  is  an 
antisocial  tiller  of  the  soil.  The  migrant  and  the  ex- 
ploiter, produced  as  they  have  been  by  necessities  expressed 
in  legal  terms,  are  temporary  social  forms.  The  household 
and  the  community  are  the  permanent  forms  of  rural 
society. 

While  the  household  was  self-sufficing  it  dominated  the 
country.  Roads  were  not  of  primary  importance.  Schools 
required  to  be  only  handmaids  of  the  home,  and  the  one- 
teacher  school  did  very  well  in  the  narrow  place  allowed  by 
the  parents  to  any  teacher  other  than  themselves.  Churches 
were  forums  of  the  opinions  which  thoughtful  patriarchs 
held.    Doctrinal  argument  was  the  chief  duty  of  the  church. 


COMMUNITY  ORGANIZATION  AND   CONSOLIDATION      59 

Spiritual  nurture,  like  intellectual  culture,  had  no  need  to 
rise  above  that  fitness  which  a  man  requires  who  lives  among 
his  kindred  on  an  isolated  farm. 


IV.    The  Community  and  the  World 

Integration. — With  the  emergence  of  cities — whose  causes 
are  not  here  being  explored — country  people  have  been 
obliged  to  form  themselves  into  communities.  It  is  rightly 
said  in  some  sections:  "We  have  no  community  here,  only  a 
settle-ment."  Men  have  settled  there  and  stayed  but  they 
have  not  co-operated;  they  have  not  been  drawn  together 
by  the  study  of  the  marvels  of  transportation  and  of  inter- 
national commerce.  When  the  first  foods  have  come  from 
afar — sugar  from  Cuba  more  tasty  than  sorghum,  bananas 
from  the  tropics  cheaper  than  native  apples,  ginger  in  Chi- 
nese wrappings  more  salable  than  spruce-gum — then  the 
process  has  begun  which  will  not  end  until  the  local  com- 
munity has  organized  for  the  manufacture  of  its  raw  products 
and  their  sale  in  the  interests  of  the  neighborhood  purse. 

With  the  coming  of  intelligence  about  the  great  world, 
it  is  no  longer  sufiicient  to  be  taught  to  read  and  write  and 
cipher;  a  great  competition  sets  in  requiring  the  local  com- 
munity to  educate  its  children  until  eighteen  years  of  age 
in  the  best  learning  and  culture  of  the  times.  This  involves 
the  creation  of  institutions  as  large  as  the  country  can 
afford.  The  household  farmer  kept  his  institutions  small, 
in  order  that  he  might  live  at  home  in  a  maximum  degree. 
The  community  farmer  makes  his  schools,  his  churches,  and 
his  business  enterprises  as  big  as  he  can,  on  the  principle  of 
modern  economy  and  for  the  further  reasons  that  leaders 
adequate  to  the  country  business  are  few  and  the  larger 
the  grouping  the  better  the  chance  of  finding  a  leader. 

A  Larger  Unit  Needed. — The  household  is  inadequate 
because  its  members  go  away,  leaving  it  diminished  in  size. 
The  stronger  go  and  leave  the  weak;  the  leaders  go  and 


6o  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

leave  the  tame  and  docile  clustered  in  the  farmhouse,  with- 
out initiative  and  without  defense.  The  household  is  edu- 
cationally inadequate;  and  the  one- teacher  school  which 
is  its  handmaiden  has  no  abilities  with  which  to  command 
any  situation.  The  content  of  modern  teaching  cannot  be 
written  on  the  small  blackboard  of  the  one-room  school, 
any  more  than  the  passion  of  world  service  can  be  embodied 
in  a  church  without  either  a  pastor,  an  organization,  or  a 
social  philosophy. 

When  wheat  is  priced  in  London,  wool  prices  are  fixed 
by  the  Australian  fleece,  butter  dominated  by  Denmark, 
beef  by  Argentina,  and  American  cotton  lifts  its  white  boll 
to  greet  the  cotton  of  Egypt,  then  community  organization 
begins  to  be  talked  of  in  every  farming  country.  Tillers  of 
the  soil  all  over  the  world  say  "farmers  must  organize." 
In  all  lands,  from  Japan  to  Oregon  and  back  again  the  other 
way,  the  form  of  permanent  organization  is  as  big  as  may 
be,  consistently  with  the  absolute  necessity  of  personal  ac- 
quaintance. Farmers  who  organize  must  trust  one  another, 
and  the  basis  of  trust  is  the  verifying  of  personal  character 
by  personal  acquaintance.  This  means  in  business  the  co- 
operative unit.  It  means  in  education  the  consolidated 
school.    It  means  in  religion  the  federated  church. 

The  Enlarged  Horizon. — The  organization  of  country 
people  to  confront  the  world  is  the  community,  and  as  a 
natural  thing  the  community  is  as  large  as  possible.  Its 
size  is  limited  only  by  the  team-haul.  As  soon  as  the  auto- 
mobile shall  have  superseded  horse-drawn  vehicles  the 
country  community  will  be  made  larger.  The  spirit  at 
work  in  it  is  one  of  bigness.  In  this  the  present  time  differs 
from  the  period  of  household  farming,  for  in  that  time  men 
idealized  the  small  neighborhood.  The  family  was  self- 
sufhcient,  with  its  mind  concentred  upon  itself.  Men  did 
not  look  afar,  but  very  intensely  at  home.  Now  the  farmer 
or  villager  is  offered  broad  views  of  the  world  and  he  must 
seek  broad  relations  with  his  neighbors. 


Cast  of  "Midsummer  Night's  Dream"  as  presented  by  the  school  children 
of  Rockingham,  N.  C. 


A  school  assembly  room 
A  place  where  the  whole  community  may  congregate 


COMMUNITY  ORGANIZATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION      6 1 

Reasons  for  this  are  found  in  the  fact  that  open-country 
communities  are  less  populous  than  they  were  before  ma- 
chinery displaced  farm-hands.  Village  communities  are 
based  upon  commercial  enterprises  which  of  their  very  na- 
ture seek  enlargement.  The  margin  of  profit  being  small, 
merchants  and  agents,  lawyers  and  contractors,  physicians 
and  commission  men  who  make  up  village  populations,  seek 
to  enlarge  their  community  boundaries  by  extending  their 
clientele.  Thus  the  village-centred  country  communities 
are  to-day  as  big  as  they  can  be. 

The  dominant  type  of  farmer  in  this  era  of  the  social 
control  of  agriculture  is  a  man  who  respects  bigness.  He 
wants  big  machinery,  big  cattle,  big  horses,  and  he  aspires 
to  till  an  acreage  up  to  the  economic  limit.  Such  men  have 
a  great  influence  in  the  direction  of  enlarging  the  community. 
Their  influence  is  always  exerted  toward  an  enlistment  in 
the  big  world  in  as  big  companies  as  possible.  They  are 
impatient  of  little  churches,  of  petty  educational  work,  and 
of  country  Ufe  too  localized.  As  this  type  of  husbandman 
attains  a  greater  influence  in  the  country,  community  or- 
ganization takes  the  place  of  tiny  ^'settle-ment''  organiza- 
tion. The  sense  of  neighborhood  is  extended  to  a  larger 
circle.  But  always  within  the  limitation  that  the  community 
can  he  as  large  as  personal  acquaintance  and  no  larger.  The 
consolidated  school  is  a  great  invention  for  enlarging,  en- 
riching, and  refining  this  acquaintance  unit.  Here  is  one  of 
its  dominant  aims. 

V.     Community  Ways 

The  internal  organization  of  the  country  community  is 
peculiar  to  itself.  Among  European  and  American  rural 
populations  it  partakes  of  certain  characteristics  which,  if 
the  term  be  not  misunderstood,  may  be  called  ^^demo- 
cratic." The  country  community,  with  its  radius  of  five 
and  diameter  of  ten  miles,  is  just  about  big  enough  to  dis- 


WHAT  THIS  COMMUNITY  DID 

IT  MOBIUIZED   FOR  RESUUTS 


THREE  THINGS  ARE   CONSIOCREO 

IS  IT  POSSlBUe  FOR   A  COMMUNITy  TO   PUAN   FOR  ITS  FUTURE   OCVCUOPMCT? 

DO  WE   CARC  TO    OO   IT7     IS    IT  W  O  RTH  W  H  I  UE  7     I  F  SO  H  O  W  C  AN   IT   B  B   OO  N  E  7 

ir  DECI8IOIl_IS_f  AVORABLe  COMMITTEf  8  ARE  APPOINTEO  TO  STUDY  TOWWV»NO  REPORT  DEflNITE  PBOJeCTS  FOR  THEXpMINQ  YEAR 


62 


WHAT  ONE  COMMUNITY  FOUND 
—  ORGANIZATIONS  SELF-CENTERED 


^^PUBUC    X  PUBLJC        ^ 


SCHOOL 


'UBL 
CiAL 


63 


64  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

cover  leaders  and  to  correlate  personality  with  leadership. 
As  the  rule  in  all  community  organizations,  financial  and 
other,  one  man  has  one  vote — at  least  there  is  a  limit  put 
upon  the  power  of  any  one  man,  such  as  to  reserve  for  per- 
sonality a  secure  place.  In  a  Middle  West  grain-elevator 
organization,  for  example,  one  man  may  own  four  shares, 
but  he  may  have  only  one  vote  in  the  control  of  this  com- 
munity enterprise. 

Another  way  of  the  country  might  be  expressed  in  the 
term  country-mindedness.  Granges  exclude  those  who  are 
not  in  businesses  which  insure  their  having  rural  sympathy. 
Country  communities  are  jealous  of  outsiders.  In  some  way 
the  man  of  influence  must  belong  to  the  sacred  industry, 
the  fellowship  of  those  who  till  the  soil.  He  must  know  the 
fight  with  nature  from  personal  experience  or  they  will  not 
work  with  him.  Farmers  believe  themselves  to  be  in  an 
industry  set  apart,  unlike  any  other,  but  necessary  to  all 
others.  To  be  country-born,  to  till  and  own,  to  be  a  country- 
school  teacher,  minister,  or  physician,  or  of  some  essentially 
related  trade,  is  necessary  if  one  is  to  get  within  the  circle 
of  rural  influence. 

The  functions  of  the  country  community,  which  must  be 
locally  performed,  are  production,  with  its  attendant  tasks 
of  breeding,  orcharding,  and  so  forth;  manufacture  of  raw 
materials  raised;  the  final  organization  of  credit,  in  exchanges 
of  borrowers;  education  in  schools  which  teach  the  child 
until  he  is  eighteen  years  of  age  during  the  period  of  his  en- 
largement upon  the  whole  world;  and  religion,  in  the  con- 
gregation of  worshippers.  Social  welfare  among  country 
people  requires  a  community  performing  these  in  a  maxi- 
mum degree.  The  consolidated  school  is  the  natural  out- 
come of  social  evolution,  in  which  personality  bursts  the 
confines  of  family  and  merges  with  community  and  world 
experience.  This  thought  will  be  amplified  in  the  following 
chapter. 


COMMUNITY  ORGANIZATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION      65 

Summary 

The  country  community  is  the  acquaintance  unit,  the 
habitat  of  the  farm  or  village  family. 

Necessities  of  life  determine  the  form  of  the  social  unit 
of  country  life. 

Household  organization  has  been  superseded  by  com- 
munity organization,  with  several  intermediate  and  sec- 
ondary types,  such  as  individuaUst,  migrants,  speculators, 
all  created  by  the  forces  of  necessity. 

The  husbandman  is  the  countryman  who  responds  to 
social  control  of  the  whole  world,  which  centres  in  cities, 
railroads,  and  markets. 

To  the  world  control  the  household  is  not  adequate,  and 
the  community,  because  it  is  bigger,  a  better  field  of  leader- 
ship and  a  safer  arena  of  personality,  is  consciously  organ- 
ized by  husbandmen  in  co-operative  business  and  consoli- 
dated schools. 

PROBLEMS   IN   APPLICATION 

See  end  of  next  chapter.  These  two  chapters  may  be  considered  as  a 
unit,  both  dealing  with  the  forces  which  enlarge  the  rural  social 
mind  in  its  knowledge,  habits,  and  ideals  to  county-unit  and  con- 
solidated-school size.  These  forces  lie  at  the  basis  of  all  school 
reform  and  must  be  thoroughly  understood  in  considering  demo- 
cratic modes  of  advance  in  our  country.  These  social  forces  are 
frequently  overlooked  and  underestimated  in  attempting  to  es- 
tablish consolidation.  Democracy  is  a  mode  of  living  in  which 
all  gain  education  and  growth  by  participation  and  sharing  social 
responsibility.  Communities  must  grow  to  the  co-operation  level 
before  consolidation  of  interests  and  efforts  will  flourish.  The 
school  is  both  an  outcome  and  a  potent  cause  of  such  social 
development . — Ed  . 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

See  end  of  jollowing  chapter 


CHAPTER   IV 
RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND   CONSOLIDATION 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  See  those  at  the  beginning  of  the  preceding  chapter. 

2.  What  is  the  unit  of  school  organization  in  your  county?    What  is 

the  unit  of  civil  (governmental)  organization  ?  What  is  the  unit 
of  trade,  of  buying  and  selling?  Are  these  the  same?  Should 
they  be? 

3.  What  has  the  rural  church  done  in  any  community  with  which  you 

are  familiar  in  promoting  the  broader  social  mind  and  spirit  of 
co-operation  necessary  to  consolidation?    What  could  it  do? 

4.  If  possible  give  an  example  of  a  church  that  promotes  broad  com- 

munity organization  and  consciousness.  (See  chaps.  XVII  and 
XVIII  of  Vogt's  "Rural  Sociology"  and  chap.  IV  in  Foght's 
"The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work.") 

5.  Examine  the  writer's  volumes  on  "Rural  Economics"  and  "Hand- 

book of  Readings  in  Rural  Economics."    Macmillan. 

I.     Social  Unity  Preceding  Consolidation 

Need  of  Neighborhood  Self-Consciousness. — One  of  t!ie 
greatest  obstacles  in  the  way  of  an  effective  organization  of 
rural  communities  for  the  co-operation  of  consolidation  or 
anything  else,  as  shown  in  the  preceding  chapter,  is  the 
difficulty  which  the  people  have  in  realizing  their  own  unity. 
The  perception  by  the  people  that  they  really  are  a  com- 
munity must  precede  any  effective  organization.  The  basis 
of  all  community  of  action  is  territorial  unity.  There  should 
also  be  racial  unity  and  ideational  unity,  but  without  ter- 
ritorial unity  the  others  can  scarcely  exist.  Whether  we  are 
speaking  of  the  great  community  called  the  nation  or  a  small 
community  called  a  neighborhood,  the  principles  are  very 
much  the  same. 

66 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND  CONSOLIDATION  67 

Suppose,  for  example,  we  were  to  try  to  realize  the  unity 
of  the  great  community  called  the  nation  under  the  follow- 
ing conditions:  Let  us  suppose  that  for  purposes  of  military 
defense  the  present  territory  of  the  United  States  was  in- 
cluded with  its  existing  boundaries,  coasts,  and  frontiers. 
Then  let  us  suppose  that  for  purposes  of  civil  administra- 
tion the  territory  west  of  the  Mississippi  River,  and  also 
Mexico  and  Alaska,  were  a  unit  and  were  entirely  separated 
from  the  territory  east  of  the  Mississippi  River,  which  might 
include  a  good  part  of  the  Dominion  of  Canada.  Then  sup- 
pose that  for  purposes  of  education  the  old  Mason  and 
Dixon's  line  were  taken  as  the  dividing-line  between  dif- 
ferent systems,  all  of  North  America  north  of  the  Ohio 
River,  including  the  Dominion  of  Canada,  being  treated  as 
one  unit,  and  all  south  of  the  Ohio,  including  Mexico,  being 
treated  as  another  unit.  In  this  mixed-up  state  of  affairs 
it  is  apparent  that  none  of  us  would  have  a  very  clear  idea 
as  to  what  our  nation  was. 

We  are  to-day  suffering  from  some  such  confusion  with 
respect  to  the  small  community  known  as  the  neighborhood. 
Most  of  us  have  rather  vague  ideas  as  to  what  our  neighbor- 
hood is.  For  educational  purposes  (i)  we  have,  for  example, 
one  territorial  unit.  For  marketing  purposes  (2)  we  have 
another,  more  or  less  understood  but  not  usually  found 
located  on  our  maps.  That  is  to  say,  farmers  will  drive  a 
certain  distance  to  a  certain  town  or  trading  centre;  the 
territory  which  is  tributary  to  that  centre  is  not  very  well 
marked,  and  does  not  coincide  with  any  political  boundary. 
Then  for  purposes  of  civil  administration  (3)  we  have  the 
town  and  township,  the  county,  etc.  I  am  afraid  that  we 
shall  never  develop  the  genuine  neighborhood  conscience 
until  we  achieve  something  like  unity  in  these  three  inter- 
ests. The  school  district,  the  civil  township,  and  the  eco- 
nomic unit  should  coincide  as  nearly  as  possible.  When 
farmers  have  to  go  to  one  place  on  election  day,  to  another 
place  for  trading  and  shipping,  and  to  still  a  third  for  their 


68  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

school  meetings,  they  cannot  be  blamed  for  their  lack  of 
neighborhood  conscience.  Where  the  school  and  the  civil 
administration  and  the  market-place  are  in  the  same  centre, 
with  the  same  territory  tributary  in  all  three  respects,  it  is 
possible  to  develop  a  genuine  neighborhood  conscience. 
This,  in  my  opinion,  is  one  of  the  strongest  economic  rea- 
sons for  the  consolidated  school. 

The  Economic  Boundaries. — However,  I  think  danger 
may  some  time  arise.  The  work  of  consolidation  may  go 
too  far.  The  territorial  unit  which  should  be  included  in  a 
school  district  should  not  be  greater  on  the  average  than  the 
township,  though  in  sparsely  settled  regions  it  might  be 
larger.  If  the  boundaries  of  the  township  can  be  redrawn 
so  as  to  coincide  with  the  boundaries  of  the  marketing  dis- 
trict, still  another  advantage  will  be  gained.  If  the  school 
district  should  be  made  too  large,  it  might  defeat  the  develop- 
ment of  the  neighborhood  conscience  as  surely  as  though  it 
were  too  small. 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  determination  of  the  boundaries 
of  the  consolidated  district  should  be  a  part  of  a  general  plan 
for  community  building  and  should  not  stand  alone.  If  the 
planning  is  done  with  a  view  to  the  administrative  efficiency 
of  the  school  system  and  that  alone,  some  very  large  and 
important  social  interests  are  certain  to  be  neglected.  Be- 
cause the  small  single-room  school  district  of  the  old  type 
does  not  coincide  with  any  other  economic  or  social  unit  is, 
in  my  opinion,  one  of  the  chief  reasons  for  condemning  it. 

One  of  the  first  objects  which  the  consolidated  school 
ought  to  achieve  is  to  acquaint  the  pupils  intimately  and 
comprehensively  with  their  geographical  habitat;  that  is, 
with  the  geographical  features  of  the  school  district.  There 
should,  for  example,  be  an  outline  map  of  the  district 
painted  permanently  on  the  blackboard,  showing  not  only 
the  boundaries  of  the  district  but  every  road  and  by-road, 
every  creek  and  swimming-hole,  every  important  hill  and 
valley,  the  boundaries  of  every  farm,  the  location  of  the 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND   CONSOLIDATION  69 

farm  buildings,  and  even  the  boundaries  of  the  fields  on  the 
farm,  with  something  to  indicate  woodland,  pasture,  and 
ploughland.  Then  from  year  to  year  the  crop  which  is  grow- 
ing in  each  field  could  be  indicated  by  means  of  colored 
chalk.  With  this  map  constantly  before  the  eyes  of  the 
pupils,  and  with  constant  encouragement  to  correct  it, 
complete,  and  fill  it  in,  indicating  from  week  to  week  the 
condition  of  the  crop  in  each  field,  the  pupils  would  begin  to 
know  their  own  geographic  habitat.  Again,  they  should  be 
made  acquainted  with  the  products  of  the  district  and  the 
outlets  of  the  inlets. 

When  the  school  district  coincides  with  an  economic 
unit,  that  is,  when  practically  all  the  farmers  of  the  school 
district  do  their  marketing  at  the  same  place,  this  is  made 
possible;  but  it  is  hardly  possible  with  the  school  district  as 
it  is  now  organized  in  many  of  our  States.  The  pupils,  or 
at  least  the  older  pupils,  should  know  from  year  to  year 
what  is  shipped  out  of  the  school  district  and  at  least  the 
larger  items  which  are  shipped  in  to  supply  the  needs  of 
the  district.  When  every  person  who  grows  up  within  a 
school  district  is  thus  familiar  with  the  basic  economic  facts 
regarding  it,  there  will  be  knowledge  enough  to  form  the 
basis  for  neighborhood  discussion;  and  out  of  this  will  grow 
something  which  may  be  not  inaptly  called  neighborhood 
statesmanship. 

I  am  convinced  that  the  average  neighborhood  needs 
statesmanship  quite  as  intensely  as  the  large  community 
known  as  the  nation  needs  it.  One  reason  why  we  have 
national  statesmanship  is  because  people  have  a  fairly 
definite  conception  of  national  unity  and  of  national  in- 
terests. The  average  high-school  pupil  to-day  learns  more 
about  national  exports  and  imports  than  about  the  exports 
and  imports  from  his  own  neighborhood.  He  knows  more 
about  crop  areas  and  maximum  and  minimum  production 
in  the  nation  as  a  whole  than  he  knows  about  his  own  com- 
munity.   People  are  therefore  thinking  about  national  prob- 


70  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

lems  and  discussing  them,  and  out  of  this  knowledge, 
thought,  and  discussion  grows  national  statesmanship.  Let 
us  by  all  means  promote  in  every  possible  way  the  develop- 
ment also  of  neighborhood  statesmanship.  If  every  neigh- 
borhood develops  something  akin  to  statesmanship  and 
really  begins  to  take  measures  to  promote  its  own  prosper- 
ity, one  might  almost  say  that  the  prosperity  of  the  nation 
as  a  whole  would  take  care  of  itself,  though,  of  course,  there 
would  still  be  need  for  national  statesmanship.  However, 
they  who  have  been  able  to  think  clearly  and  plan  wisely 
regarding  the  economic  interests  of  the  neighborhood,  will 
furnish  the  very  best  material  out  of  which  to  develop  men 
who  can  think  clearly  and  plan  wisely  regarding  the  larger 
national  interests. 

II.     Integrating  Country  Life 

Organization  of  Rural  Communities. — The  writer  has 
been  actively  interested  for  a  number  of  years  in  promoting 
a  better  organization  of  rural  interests.  The  more  he 
studies  the  problem  the  more  he  is  convinced  that  the  ef- 
fective organizations  of  these  rural  interests  must  begin 
with  a  definite  neighborhood  conscience.  He  sees  in  the 
consolidated  school  the  key  to  the  whole  situation,  provided,  as 
suggested  above,  the  boundaries  of  the  school  district  co- 
incide fairly  closely  with  the  boundaries  of  the  unit  of  civil 
administration  and  of  the  economic  unit  as  described  above. 
After  this  has  been  achieved,  the  school  may  very  well 
become  a  centre  of  the  organization  movement.  One  of  the 
most  striking  things  about  the  effective  rural  organization 
of  Denmark  as  well  as  of  Holland,  Germany,  Belgium,  and 
Ireland,  is  the  part  which  the  school  has  played.  There  the 
local  schoolmaster  is  usually  the  secretary  of  the  farmers' 
co-operative  association;  and  one  reason  why  he  can  func- 
tion so  well  in  this  capacity  is  that  the  school  district  is  a 
real  neighborhood  and  not  merely  a  certain  number  of  square 
miles  of  territory. 


m 


I  P:Hl.llt|fi;:!ll 


h^|3|     sit 


ii  ^  lilii^lPKl!:  Ill 


i.i:ilill';lliil^iS;'i 

>5h  £  si?  i8s<  :  S.S  6S^hI^2 


(From  the  Year-Book  of  the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture  for 


71 


72 


THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 


It  is  not  very  difficult  to  convince  farmers  of  the  advan- 
tage of  organization.  There  is  probably  not  a  farming  com- 
munity in  the  United  States  which  does  not  need  some 
form  of  organization.  Much  excellent  work  has  been  done 
by  certain  national  associations,  such  as  the  Grange,  the 
Farmers'  Union,  the  Gleaners,  the  Society  of  Equity,  etc. 
But  the  thing  that  still  is  lacking  is  community  organization. 

However,  organization  for  its  own  sake  is  a  very  poor 
programme.  Organization  to  supply  certain  definite  needs 
is  a  very  good  programme.  No  two  communities  are  likely 
to  have  precisely  the  same  needs;  therefore  no  two  com- 
munities are  likely  to  be  served  by  precisely  the  same  kind 
of  an  organization.  A  considerable  study  of  the  problem 
has  convinced  the  writer  that  the  following  outline  includes 
the  principal  needs  of  the  average  rural  community: 


Needs     of 
rural  com- 
munities s 
which  require 
organization 


I.  Business 
needs 


II.  Social 
needs 


Better  farm  production. 

Better  marketing  facilities. 

Better  means  of  securing  farm  supplies. 

Better  credit  facilities. 

Better  means  of  communication: 

a.  Roads. 

h.  Telephones. 

1.  Better  educational  facilities. 

2.  Better  sanitation. 

3.  Better  opportunities  for  recreation. 

4.  Beautification  of  the  countryside. 

5.  Better  home  economics. 


Social  Needs. — The  business  needs  of  the  farmers  have 
received  somewhat  more  attention  than  the  social  needs, 
and  yet  it  is  probable  that  the  social  needs  are  quite  as  acute 
as  the  business  needs.  It  was  at  one  time  believed  that  the 
one  thing  needful  for  the  improvement  of  country  life  was 
to  increase  the  income  of  the  farmers.  We  are  now  begin- 
ning to  discover  that  that  is  only  half  of  the  problem,  and  by 
no  means  the  most  difficult  half.  We  find,  for  example,  that 
the  wealthy  farmer  is  more  likely  to  move  to  town  than  the 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND  CONSOLIDATION  73 

unprosperous  farmer.  In  fact,  the  wealthy  farmer  some- 
times moves  to  town  simply  because  he  is  wealthy — because 
he  has  accumulated  a  competence  and  is  therefore  able  to 
afford  the  luxuries  of  city  life.  Those  sections  of  the  country 
where  agriculture  has  been  most  prosperous,  where  land  is 
highest  in  price,  and  where  farmers  have  grown  rich  in  the 
largest  numbers,  are  the  very  sections  from  which  they  have 
retired  to  town  with  the  greatest  unanimity,  and  where 
there  is  in  consequence  the  largest  percentage  of  tenancy. 

In  some  of  these  rich  sections  we  find  the  schools  and 
churches  and  other  agencies  as  badly  run  down  as  in  the 
poorest  sections.  In  fact,  if  you  want  to  find  the  best  gen- 
eral social,  educational,  and  economic  conditions  in  the 
open  country  you  should  go,  not  to  the  regions  where  the 
soil  is  rich  nor  to  the  very  poorest,  but  to  sections  where  the 
land  is  just  moderately  productive.  Here  you  will  find 
farmers  who  are  moderately  well-to-do  hut  not  rich  enough  to 
retire.  They  stay  on  their  farms  and  educate  their  chil- 
dren, and  build  up  schools,  churches,  roads,  and  other 
things  to  make  country  life  tolerable.  In  the  very  poorest 
sections  of  course  they  cannot  afford  these  things.  In  the 
very  richest  sections  the  landowners  are  living  in  town  and 
spending  their  money  there,  and  spending  just  as  little  in 
their  old  neighborhoods  as  they  possibly  can. 

The  writer  well  remembers  a  certain  school  district  in 
the  heart  of  the  corn  belt  as  it  was  about  forty  years  ago. 
He  has  recently  been  back  to  the  same  neighborhood.  The 
schoolhouse  is  just  as  it  was  forty  years  ago.  It  has  been 
kept  in  fair  repair,  but  so  far  as  improvements  are  concerned 
not  ten  dollars  have  been  expended  either  on  the  building 
or  on  the  grounds.  The  school-teachers  get  very  little  more 
in  the  way  of  salary  than  they  got  forty  years  ago,  yet  forty 
years  ago  the  whole  district  could  have  been  bought  at  $25 
an  acre.  Now  there  is  scarcely  an  acre  that  could  be  bought 
for  less  than  $150,  and  the  price  runs  from  that  up  to  $200 
an  acre.    It  would  seem  as  though  the  people  were  finan- 


74  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

dally  able  to  support  a  much  better  school.  However, 
forty  years  ago  but  two  farms  in  the  district  were  farmed 
by  tenants.  Now  more  than  three-fourths  of  them  are  so 
farmed.    The  owners  are  "living  in  town.'^ 

Where  this  situation  exists  we  get  into  a  vicious  circle. 
Because  the  school  is  so  poor  farmers  who  care  for  the 
education  of  their  children  do  not  Kke  to  live  there;  they 
move  to  town  as  soon  as  they  can  afford  it.  Because  they 
move  to  town  the  schools  remain  poor  and  inefficient,  and  so 
things  go  from  bad  to  worse.  Something  must  be  done,  ap- 
parently, to  make  it  more  worth  while  for  well-to-do  farmers 
who  really  care  for  good  schools  to  remain  in  the  country 
where  they  can  support  good  schools.  One  difficulty  with 
the  school  just  described  is  that  the  district  included  but 
four  square  miles.  The  consolidated  school,  which  would 
give  the  farm  children  some  of  the  advantages  which  they 
get  in  a  city  graded  school,  would  have  gone  a  long  way  to- 
ward keeping  some  of  those  farmers  on  the  land. 

The  Cityward  Tendency. — If  we  were  distressed  to  find 
that  water  was  flowing  from  one  lake  into  another,  we  should 
not  think  it  a  very  wise  plan  to  try  to  pump  some  of  it  back 
into  the  upper  lake.  That  would  only  accelerate  the  flow 
downward  again.  We  should  try  rather  to  prevent  the  flow 
downward.  For  a  long  time  many  people  have  been  dis- 
tressed to  find  that  population  is  moving  from  the  country 
districts  to  the  cities  and  towns.  It  has  occurred  to  some 
of  them  that  the  thing  to  do  is  to  colonize  city  people  in  the 
country.  This  plan  is  just  about  as  wise  as  that  of  pump- 
ing water  back  from  the  lower  into  the  upper  lake.  It  would 
only  accelerate  the  movement  cityward.  It  ought  not  to 
take  a  very  wise  man  to  see  that  it  would  be  wiser  to  find  out 
why  the  people  are  moving  cityward  and  then,  if  possible, 
to  remove  the  cause. 

One  reason  undoubtedly  is  that,  for  some  years  at  least, 
the  rewards  of  labor  have  been  higher  in  the  cities  than  in 
the  country.     That  which  we  now  call  the  rising  cost  of 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND   CONSOLIDATION  75 

living  is  partly  a  movement  toward  an  equilibrium;  that  is, 
toward  a  condition  where  the  rewards  of  industry  will  be 
approximately  as  great  in  the  country  as  in  the  city.  When 
the  farmers  are  enabled  to  get  a  little  higher  price  still  for 
their  products  we  may  expect  that  the  equilibrium  will  be 
reached. 

There  is  another  reason,  perhaps  still  more  important, 
why  country  people  move  to  the  city.  Some  of  the  most 
prosperous  of  the  country  people  do  not  find  in  the  country 
the  means  of  social,  intellectual,  and  esthetic  satisfaction 
which  their  prosperity  enables  them  to  afford.  They  find 
them  in  somewhat  greater  measure  in  the  towns  and,  since 
they  can  afford  to  do  so,  they  retire  from  the  farms  to  the 
towns.  This  movement  of  prosperous  people  from  the  farms 
to  the  towns  will  never  he  stopped  until  the  country  offers  as 
great  attractions  as  the  towns.  Until  this  is  done,  the  faster 
farmers  become  prosperous  enough  to  afford  to  retire  to  the 
towns,  the  faster  they  will  retire. 

Another  reason  why  country  people  move  to  cities  is 
that  some  of  them  have  not  been  trained  to  see  and  appreci- 
ate the  real  satisfaction  which  country  life  affords.  People 
who  think  that  an  electric  sign  is  more  beautiful  than  a 
sunset,  that  shop-windows  are  more  beautiful  than  grass 
and  trees  and  flowers,  that  crowded  streets  are  more  beau- 
tiful than  open  fields,  that  one  of  our  modern  plays,  most  of 
which  are  written  by  men  who  mistake  neurosis  for  men- 
tality, is  more  beautiful  than  an  outdoor  pageant,  will  prob- 
ably continue  to  go  to  the  cities.  Well,  the  country  will 
perhaps  be  well  rid  of  them.  But  the  desire  for  change  and 
variety  of  experience  in  a  lifetime  will  always  remain  a  big 
factor  as  long  as  town  and  country  are  so  unlike  in  so  many 
ways. 

There  are  two  things  above  all  others  which  need  to  be 
done.  The  rewards  of  labor,  abstinence,  and  enterprise  in 
the  country  must  be  still  further  increased,  and  more  of  the 
adornments  and  embellishments  of  life  must  be  made  avail- 


76  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

able  for  country  people.  In  order  to  increase  the  farmers' 
income  we  must  spread  scientific  information  more  effec- 
tively, we  must  have  better  methods  of  marketing,  of  pur- 
chasing farm  supplies,  and  of  financing  the  farmers'  busi- 
ness enterprises.  In  order  to  increase  the  adornments  and 
embellishments  of  life  in  the  country,  we  must  have  better 
schools,  better  sanitation,  better  recreation,  and  more  gen- 
eral beautification  of  the  countryside.  These  are  all  essen- 
tial parts  of  a  constructive  rural  programme.  Every  item 
in  that  programme  calls  for  organization. 

The  School  at  the  Centre. — The  key  to  most  of  the  edu- 
cational problems  of  the  country  is  the  country  school. 
There  is  scarcely  a  single  phase  of  country  life  in  which  the 
country  school  may  not  become  a  vitalizing  factor.  The 
boys'  and  girls'  clubs  should  begin  there.  The  study  of 
farm  production,  of  marketing,  of  sources  of  supply,  of  farm 
accounts,  and  of  road  and  telephone  construction  should  be 
a  part  of  the  work  of  the  country  school.  But  this  work 
should  be  extended  over  the  social  interests  of  the  commu- 
nity also.  The  knowledge  of  one's  environment  should  in- 
clude one's  economic  and  social  as  well  as  one's  physical 
environment.  The  first  attention  of  the  committee  on  edu- 
cation should  obviously  be  directed  toward  the  country 
schools. 

There  should  be  a  distinct  and  persistent  movement  to 
make  the  country  schools  at  least  as  efficient  as  the  city 
schools.  To  accomplish  this  the  entire  school  system  of  the 
State  must  eventually  be  supported  and  administered  as  a 
unit,  as  the  school  system  of  a  city  is  now.  That  one  sec- 
tion of  a  city  is  less  wealthy  than  another  is  not  considered 
a  valid  reason  why  the  children  of  the  poorer  section  should 
have  poorer  schools  than  those  of  the  richer  section.  This 
policy  should  be  made  to  apply  to  the  entire  State.  That 
there  is  less  wealth  in  the  country  than  in  the  city  ought  not 
to  be  considered  a  valid  reason  why  the  country  children 
should  have  poorer  schools  than  the  city  children.     They 


Learning  now  lo  prune  an  orchard 


^HHS^h^I^hhI 

K 

iW^fff^^'^^^WWi  JMW 

^  «'* '  .    '  '  jr^nC  ''.d^^l^rlKj!^ 

HPPHEH 

^^. 

j^iri^ 

1 

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Reproduced  by  courtesy  of  Division  of  Agriculliiral  Instruction,  U .  S.  Depl.  of  Agriculture 

An  orchard  project.     Renovation  of  an  old  orchard  by  high-school  boys  in 

Maryland 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND   CONSOLIDATION  77 

should  all  have  equal  support  out  of  the  tax  fund  of  the  en- 
tire State,  and  they  should  all  be  administered  as  a  unit. 
If  each  ward  of  the  city  were  restricted  to  the  taxes  of  that 
ward  for  school  purposes,  it  would  often  happen  that  the 
most  populous  wards,  where  there  were  the  most  children 
needing  schools,  would  have  the  least  money  to  support 
their  schools,  because  of  the  scarcity  of  taxable  property, 
while  the  least  populous  wards,  where  children  were  scarc- 
est, would  have  the  most  money  for  schools,  because  of  the 
large  amounts  of  taxable  property.  This  would  be  so  ob- 
viously wasteful  and  inefficient  that  no  enlightened  city 
would  tolerate  it.  Yet  that  is  precisely  what  happens  in  all 
of  our  States.  Schools  are  supported,  not  in  proportion  to 
the  need  for  them,  which  is  the  only  correct  principle,  but 
mainly  in  proportion  to  the  amount  which  each  community 
can  raise. 

In  order  that  the  State  school  system  may  be  adminis- 
tered as  a  unit  there  must  be  at  the  head  of  the  State  sys- 
tem a  highly  trained  expert,  not  elected,  but  appointed  as 
is  the  superintendent  of  a  city-school  system.  He  should 
have  ample  power  and  an  adequate  staff  of  assistants  and 
inspectors  to  enable  him  actually  to  inspect  the  schools  of 
every  county  in  the  State. 

Again,  in  each  county  there  should  be  an  educator,  not 
elected  as  most  county  superintendents  are  now,  but  ap- 
pointed by  a  board  of  education  as  are  city  superintendents, 
with  ample  power  and  a  staff  of  assistants  which  will  en- 
able him  to  inspect  and  control  every  school  in  the  county. 
Again,  the  county  should  be  redistricted  so  that  every 
school  district  shall  be  large  enough  to  support  a  first-rate 
school  which  shall  compare  favorably  with  the  schools  of 
the  cities  and  the  larger  towns.  The  boundaries  of  this  dis- 
trict should,  as  stated  above,  coincide  so  far  as  possible  with 
those  of  the  unit  of  civil  administration  and  also,  so  far  as 
they  can  be  determined,  with  those  of  an  economic  unit. 

Until  these  things  can  be  brought  about  through  State 


78  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

legislation  each  community  can  do  a  great  deal  toward  the 
improvement  of  its  own  schools  through  concerted  action. 
The  study  of  the  broader  questions  of  national  economy 
may  well  be  turned  over  to  the  higher  institutions  of  learn- 
ing, where  students  are  more  mature  than  they  who  attend 
the  district  school.  But  the  questions  of  local  or  neighbor- 
hood economy,  with  which  the  study  of  economics  ought 
always  to  begin,  may  be  studied  to  advantage  in  every 
country  school. 

But  the  country  school  cannot  possibly  do  everything  in 
the  way  of  education  that  is  needed.  At  any  rate,  there  are 
some  things  which  one  can  learn  better  outside  of. school 
than  within.  The  committee  should  learn  how  to  utilize 
other  educational  resources,  such  as  study  clubs,  natural- 
history  clubs,  circulating  libraries,  not  entirely  of  cheap 
fiction  ,'^but  in  part  at  least  of  solid  reading  which  will  be  of 
economic  use  to  the  community,  and  so  on.  Use  should 
also  be  made  of  such  educational  agencies  as  the  stereopticon 
and  motion-picture  outfits,  and  lecturers  from  the  state 
colleges  and  other  higher  institutions. 

III.     Idealizing  and  Realizing  Rural  Values 

The  moral  advantages  of  a  closer  neighborhood  organi- 
zation and  a  more  definite  neighborhood  conscience  are  al- 
most as  important  as  the  economic  advantages.  That  man 
is  a  political  animal,  we  have  on  the  authority  of  Aristotle. 
As  he  used  the  expression,  political  animal  meant  precisely 
the  same  as  social  animal.  Recent  psychologists  have  given 
a  new  support  to  this  doctrine  by  showing  that  the  individual 
never  reaches  his  normal  development  except  in  a  social 
organization.  Isolation  and  lack  of  definite  correlation 
among  individuals  produce  moral  reactions  of  the  most 
lamentable  nature.  The  individual  comes  in  much  closer 
contact  with  his  neighborhood  than  with  his  state  or  his 
nation.     His  moral  reactions  are  more  largely  determined 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND  CONSOLIDATION  79 

by  the  type  of  neighborhood  organization  than  by  the  type 
of  state  or  national  organization. 

^  They  who  cannot  or  will  not  work  together  are  the  natural  and, 
one  might  almost  say,  the  legitimate  prey  of  those  who  can.  Whether 
we  like  it  or  not,  it  is  a  law  of  life,  a  part  of  the  economy  of  nature. 
There  is  no  use  kicking  against  it;  the  only  thing  to  do  is  to  conform 
to  it.  Unless  we  can  manage  to  work  together  with  our  fellows  we 
must  expect  to  be  preyed  upon,  governed,  or  exploited  by  those  who 
can. 

No  people  ever  succeed  in  governing  themselves  until  they  are  able 
to  work  together.  Until  they  learn  that,  they  will  be  governed  by 
some  one  else,  either  an  outside  power  which  subjugates  them,  a  ruling 
class  within  their  own  members,  or  a  boss.  So  long  as  they  quarrel 
among  themselves  or  work  at  cross  purposes,  others  who  have  learned 
the  art  of  working  together  will  rule  and  exploit  them. 

It  is  as  true  in  business  as  in  government  that  the  people  who 
work  together  will  rule  or  exploit  those  who  work  at  cross  purposes. 
That  is  one  thing  which  ails  the  farmer  at  the  present  time.  It  is  not 
necessarily  true  that  farmers  are  more  cantankerous  than  other  peo- 
ple, though  it  sometimes  seems  so.  But  there  are  so  many  of  them, 
they  are  so  widely  scattered,  and  they  are  so  much  more  expert  in 
dealing  with  the  forces  of  nature  than  with  the  forces  of  society,  that 
it  is  physically  more  difficult  for  them  to  work  together  than  it  is  for 
other  classes.  However,  these  natural  obstacles  in  the  way  of  united 
effort  must  be  overcome  by  a  greater  wisdom  and  moral  discipline 
than  other  classes  possess,  otherwise  the  farmer  will  always  be  at  a 
disadvantage.  That  is  what  wisdom  and  moral  qualities  are  for — to 
overcome  difficulties. 

Now  we  need  not  waste  any  sympathy  on  those  who  will  not  or 
cannot  work  together.  They  get  what  they  deserve.  Of  course  we 
all  have  our  own  opinions  as  to  what  a  good  man  or  a  bad  man  is 
like.  We  generally  call  him  a  good  man  who  possesses  the  qualities 
which  we  admire,  which  is  very  likely  to  mean  the  qualities  which  we 
think  that  we  ourselves  possess.  Looked  at  broadly  and  imperson- 
ally, however,  the  essential  difference  between  good  men  and  bad 
men  is  that  the  former  are  very  careful  of  their  own  obligations  and 
other  people's  rights,  whereas  the  latter  are  very  particular  about 
their  own  rights  and  other  people's  obligations.  Every  great  moral 
teacher  has  tried  to  make  men  good  by  telling  them  of  their  obliga- 

*The  substance  of  the  next  few  paragraphs  was  published  in  the  Agricul- 
tural Student  in  October,  1913. 


8o  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

tions  and  not  of  their  rights.  We  are  naturally  so  much  inclined  the 
other  way  that  this  is  necessary  in  order  to  restore  a  proper  equilibrium. 
Now  it  is  rather  obvious,  is  it  not,  that  people  who  are  careful  of 
their  own  obligations  and  other  people's  rights  are  easy  to  get  along 
with.  A  community  made  up  of  such  people  can  always  work  to- 
gether. On  the  other  hand,  people  who  are  very  particular  about  their 
own  rights  and  other  people's  obligations  are  hard  to  get  along  with. 
A  community  made  up  of  such  people  cannot  work  together  at  all. 
In  our  impatience  we  are  sometimes  tempted  to  say  that  such  people 
have  no  rights  and  deserve  to  be  exploited.  However,  the  question 
becomes  complicated  when  we  have  a  community  made  up  in  part  of 
people  who  would  like  to  work  with  their  neighbors  and  in  part  of 
people  who  will  not. 

The  foregoing  is  presented  here  to  show  how  closely  the 
problem  of  organizing  rural  interests  is  bound  up  with  the 
question  of  religion  and  morals.  Unless  the  right  moral  in- 
fluences are  at  work  creating  the  spirit  of  working  together 
and  mutual  helpfulness,  no  effective  organization  will  be 
possible.  The  church,  the  school,  the  religious  press,  and 
every  other  moral  agency  must  begin  at  the  bottom  by 
teaching  people  to  be  careful  of  their  own  obligations  and 
of  the  rights  of  others,  and  overcome  the  tendency  to  be 
insistent  upon  our  own  rights  and  other  people's  obligations. 

City  Life  vs.  Country  Life.^ — Our  branch  of  the  human  race  has 
not  yet  demonstrated  its  ability  to  live  in  cities.  We  have  been  a 
pioneering  race  for  something  like  two  thousand  years,  and  no  one 
knows  how  much  longer.  It  is  probably  harder  for  a  race  to  change 
the  habits  of  its  lifetime  than  it  is  for  an  individual.  This  habit  has 
made  us  an  outdoor  race,  whose  chief  characteristic  is  strenuous  mus- 
cularity. Such  a  race  degenerates  rapidly  whenever  it  attempts  to 
live  an  indoor  life  of  bodily  ease  and  luxury.  It  is  always  at  its  best 
when  it  is  pioneering — when  it  is  obeying  the  first  command  written 
in  its  sacred  book:  "Be  fruitful,  and  multiply,  and  replenish  the  earth, 
and  subdue  it:  and  have  dominion  over  the  fish  of  the  sea,  and  over 
the  fowl  of  the  air,  and  over  every  living  thing  that  moveth  upon  the 
earth." 

We  have  all  heard  stories  of  the  children  of  certain  families  who 

*  The  substance  of  the  next  few  paragraphs  was  published  in  the  Delineator , 
June  8,  1914, 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND   CONSOLIDATION  8 1 

hang  around  home  waiting  for  the  patrimony  and  then  quarrel  over 
its  distribution.  Over  against  despicable  examples  of  this  kind  we 
have  the  more  robust  and  inspiring  examples  of  those  children  who 
go  out  into  the  world  and  create  families  and  patrimonies  of  their 
own  instead  of  quarrelling  over  their  share  of  the  estate.  When  a 
race  ceases  to  be  a  pioneering  race,  that  is,  when,  instead  of  going  out 
to  find  new  opportunities,  the  children  of  the  race  hang  around  the 
older  centres  of  civilization  waiting  for  the  accumulated  riches  of  the 
past  generations,  they  generally  fall  to  quarrelling  over  their  distribu- 
tion. This  is  even  more  despicable  than  for  the  children  of  a  family 
to  wait  for  their  patrimony,  and  it  is  a  more  certain  mark  of  degenera- 
tion. 

Much  of  that  which  goes  under  the  euphonious  name  of  social  re- 
form is  merely  a  symptom  of  this  kind  of  degeneration.  Its  home  is 
in  the  cities,  it  springs  from  urbanized  minds,  and  its  prophets  are 
mainly  members  of  urbanized  races.  Strong,  robust,  self-disciphned, 
individualistic  men  are  never  exploited.  If  they  do  not  like  their 
treatment  in  one  place,  they  go  where  there  is  land,  where  they  can  be 
independent.  Weak,  whimsical,  timid,  gregarious  men,  who  are  afraid 
to  get  very  far  from  the  herd,  are  always  exploited.  They  cannot 
even  be  truly  organized.  They  can  be  herded  together  as  mobs, 
browbeaten  by  their  own  leaders,  excited  to  spasmodic  group  action, 
but  so  far  as  constructive,  consistent,  united  action  is  concerned,  it 
is  beyond  their  power.  Only  self-disciplined  men,  capable  of  con- 
trolling their  impulses,  willing  to  suffer  loss  for  a  principle,  but  capable 
of  working  together  with  their  fellows  for  distant  ends,  either  with  or 
without  leaders,  are  capable  of  genuine  organization.  Such  men  can- 
not be  exploited. 

Another  symptom  of  the  degeneration  which  comes  to  our  race 
from  city  life  is  ''class  consciousness."  Once  upon  a  time  there  was 
an  important  dialogue  between  a  man  from  the  city  and  a  man  from 
the  country.  Please  remember  the  important  fact,  commonly  over- 
looked, that  the  one  was  from  the  city  and  the  other  was  from  the 
country.  The  man  from  the  city  asked:  "Who  is  my  neighbor?"  Such 
a  question  would  not  occur  to  a  real  countryman.  He  has  no  doubt 
as  to  who  his  neighbors  are.  But  a  man  from  the  city  does  not  al- 
ways know.  He  is  inclined  to  consider  whether  they  are  members  of 
the  same  occupation,  profession,  or  religion  as  himself,  or  whether 
they  are  people  with  about  the  same  income  who  can  entertain  on  about 
the  same  scale  as  himself,  or  whether  they  are  the  people  who  live 
within  easy  reach. 

The  man  from  the  country  who  answered  this  question  by  telling 
the  story  of  the  good  Samaritan  was  in  the  habit  of  emphasizing  the 


82  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL  SCHOOL 

fundamental  relations  of  life.  The  geometrical  relations  are  very 
much  more  fundamental  than  are  the  class  relations.  In  fact,  all 
class  consciousness,  such  as  was  shown  by  the  priest  and  the  Levite,  is 
contrary  to  the  scheme  of  life  and  social  relations  which  this  man 
from  the  country  came  to  establish.  The  wisest  social  workers  even 
in  our  cities  are  beginning  to  realize  that  the  neighborhood  must  be 
the  basis  of  a  genuine  reconstruction  of  city  life. 

Broadening  the  idea  of  neighborhood  we  have  the  principle  of  ter- 
ritoriality as  the  basis  of  nationality.  Enlarge  the  neighborhood 
sufficiently  and  we  have  the 'territorial  group  called  the  State.  Sev- 
eral times  in  the  history  of  the  race  other  groups  than  the  territorial 
group,  other  organizations  than  the  territorial  State,  have  claimed 
the  loyalty  of  the  individual.  Whenever  the  average  citizen  is  more 
loyal  to  another  group,  say  a  church,  a  party,  a  labor  organization, 
than  to  the  State,  the  State  has  disappeared.  That  is  to  say,  when  he 
will  obey  the  orders  of  some  other  organization  rather  than  the  law 
of  the  land,  the  territorial  State  has  already  been  subverted.  Needless 
to  say,  these  other  groups,  based  on  a  common  rehgion,  or  a  common 
occupation,  which  sometimes  stand  as  rivals  for  the  loyalty  of  the 
people  against  the  group,  commonly  called  the  State,  which  is  based 
on  the  occupation  of  the  same  territory,  have  their  origin  in  cities. 
Indoor  people  are  the  only  ones  who  can  easily  forget  the  principle  of 
territoriality  and  the  law  of  the  la^td. 

Pioneering  in  this  country  needs  redirection.  During  the  past 
decade  it  has  taken  thousands  of  our  most  valuable  citizens  beyond 
our  own  borders  to  enrich  the  life  and  increase  the  power  of  other 
nations.  In  place  of  these  sturdy,  self-reliant,  courageous  citizens, 
who  are  willing  to  face  hardship,  and  capable  of  creating  their  own 
opportunities,  we  are  receiving  in  vast  numbers  men  who  prefer  to 
go  where  opportunities  have  already  been  created  for  them  by  pioneer- 
ing activities  of  others,  to  fill  positions  created  for  them  by  the  busi- 
ness enterprise  of  a  sturdier  race.  In  other  words,  we  are  losing  men 
who  can  create  opportunities  and  are  receiving  men  who  are  only 
capable  of  filling  opportunities  created  by  others.  This  means  that 
we  are  in  process  of  becoming  an  urbanized,  and  therefore  a  degener- 
ate, nation. 

The  difficulty  is  not,  as  some  seem  to  think,  that  we  do  not  dis- 
tribute our  immigrants.  They  probably  do  better  to  stay  in  the  cities 
because  they  would  be  useless  on  our  farms.  Our  farmers  would  not 
hire  many  of  them,  and  they  have  not  the  qualities  which  make 
pioneer  farmers.  Besides,  if  we  could  send  more  of  them  to  the  coun- 
try and  keep  them  there  it  would  only  accelerate  the  movement  to- 
ward Canada  and  the  cities.     The  stream  of  population  is  moving 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND  CONSOLIDATION  83 

away  from  our  farm  regions.  It  is  much  more  important  that  we  re- 
tard the  flow  of  that  stream  than  that  we  try  to  turn  a  new  stream  to- 
ward the  farms. 

While  so  many  thousands  of  our  farmers  are  emigrating  beyond 
our  boundaries  in  search  of  more  land,  it  has  been  ascertained  that 
not  more  than  forty  per  cent  of  our  tillable  area  is  actually  under 
tillage,  and  of  this  not  more  than  fifteen  per  cent  is  actually  yielding 
satisfactory  returns.  If  the  untilled  sixty  per  cent  were  all  poor  land, 
while  better  land  could  be  had  for  the  asking  just  over  the  boundary,  it 
would  be  difficult  to  convince  many  of  these  farmers  that  they  ought 
to  stay  at  home  and  cultivate  this  poor  land.  But  there  are  reasons 
for  believing  that  this  is  not  generally  the  case.  The  lands  which  they 
are  seeking  abroad  have  two  characteristics  which  fit  them  for  isolated 
and  individual  farming.  The  soils  are  new  and  fertile  and  therefore 
require  no  investment  to  bring  them  to  a  high  state  of  productivity. 
Again,  they  are  suitable  for  the  growing  of  a  staple  crop — wheat — 
for  which  there  is  a  ready  sale  in  a  highly  organized  market.  Thus 
the  marketing  of  this  product  takes  care  of  itself. 

Much  of  the  land  still  untilled  in  this  country  is  capable  of  a 
high  degree  of  productivity,  but  will  require  some  investment  of  capital 
to  bring  it  to  that  state.  The  problem  of  financing  the  farmer  during 
this  period  of  waiting  must  be  solved.  Again,  much  of  this  land  is 
suitable  for  mixed  crops  and  agricultural  specialties  rather  than  for 
one  or  two  great  staple  crops.  The  products  of  this  kind  of  farm- 
ing do  not  market  themselves.  It  requires  organized  effort  on  the 
part  of  the  farmers;  therefore  the  problem  of  marketing  must  be 
solved  before  these  lands  will  attract  farmers  and  keep  them  from 
going  abroad.  Here  is  a  new  kind  of  pioneering  which  challenges  the 
young  men  and  women  of  our  race. 

The  Young  Women. — The  challenge  is  even  more  to  the 
young  women  than  to  the  young  men.  They  will  have  the 
harder  half  of  the  burden  and  they  will  find  less  to  attract 
them,  ^ost  young  men  are  attracted  by  an  outdoor  life, 
and  even  physical  hardships  do  not  deter  them,  if  there  is  a 
chance  for  real  achievement,  together  with  genuine  com- 
radeship. That  is  what  a  soldier's  life  involves.  But  none 
would  want  to  be  a  soldier  if  he  were  deprived  of  comrade- 
ship and  if  there  was  no  chance  of  achievement.  Young 
women  are  not  so  strongly  attracted  to  this  kind  of  life. 
Nothing  but  religion  will  sustain  them  in  it,  and  unfortu- 


84  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

nately  women  are,  contrary  to  the  common  belief,  far  less 
religious  than  men.  The  reason  for  this  common  error  is 
that  what  we  commonly  call  religion  is  of  a  namby-pamby 
sort.  There  is  little  in  it  to  sustain  the  spirit  of  a  crusader, 
which  is  characteristic  of  any  genuine  religion,  at  least,  the 
only  kind  which  appeals  to  men. 

To  conquer  our  untilled  lands,  to  subjugate  them,  and 
force  them  to  yield  food  for  a  great  people,  to  build  great 
families  with  high  ideals  in  order  that  we  may  become  a 
great  people  worthy  of  being  fed,  is  a  task  which  ought  to 
fire  the  ardor  of  our  young  American  crusaders  as  no  old 
crusader's  zeal  was  ever  fired.  It  is  a  vastly  greater  task 
and  vastly  more  worthy  of  accomplishment  than  any  which 
the  old  crusader  faced. 

We  have  therefore  the  opportunity  for  great  achieve- 
ment. Can  we  give  the  young  men  and  women  also  the 
comradeship  which  is,  next  to  the  opportunity  for  achieve- 
ment, the  most  important  factor  in  sweetening  the  outdoor 
life  of  hardship  to  which  we  are  calling  them  ?  They  must 
go  in  groups  and  colonies.  We  need  a  revival  and  readap- 
tation  of  the  old  New  England  method  of  settlement  by 
colonies.  Sometimes  a  preacher  would  gather  a  congrega- 
tion around  himself  and  lead  them  out  into  the  wilderness 
and  build  up  a  little  colony  around  his  church.  We  no  longer 
have  a  wilderness  where  free  land  can  be  had,  but  with  less 
hardship  a  colony  could  now  be  started  on  land  which  would 
have  to  be  purchased.  It  would  be  necessary  for  the  col- 
ony as  a  whole  to  work  out  the  problem  of  credit  and  farm 
finance.  An  organized  rural  Hfe,  whether  it  be  of  the  old 
New  England  type  or  of  some  other  type,  will  be  necessary 
to  give  the  sense  of  comradeship  in  this  great  rural  crusade. 

But  what  has  this  crusade  to  offer  to  the  young  men  and 
women  of  America?  From  the  standpoint  of  a  pig- trough 
philosophy  of  life  it  has  nothing  to  offer.  They  who  prefer 
the  flesh-pots  of  Egypt  would  better  stay  in  Egypt.  In- 
door work,  freedom  from  responsibility,  short  hours,  time 


Animal-husbandry  study  at  first-hand 


Pupils  studying  tree  grafting  at  Sherrard,  West  Virginia 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND  CONSOLIDATION  Sj 

for  carousal  in  rooms  full  of  lurid  oratory,  beer,  and  tobacco, 
will  never  be  the  lot  of  those  who  enlist  for  this  productive 
campaign.  But  from  the  standpoint  of  the  creative  philos- 
ophy of  life  it  has  the  best  things  in  the  world  to  offer. 

^'To  young  men  it  offers  days  of  toil  and  nights  of  study. 
It  offers  frugal  fare  and  plain  clothes.  It  offers  lean  bodies, 
hard  muscles,  horny  hands,  or  furrowed  brows.  It  offers 
wholesome  recreation  to  the  extent  necessary  to  maintain 
the  highest  efficiency.  It  offers  the  burdens  of  bringing  up 
families  and  training  them  in  the  productive  life.  It  offers 
the  obligation  of  using  all  wealth  as  tools  and  not  as  a 
means  of  self-gratification.  It  does  not  offer  the  insult  of 
a  life  of  ease,  or  esthetic  enjoyment,  or  graceful  consump- 
tion, or  emotional  ecstasy.  It  offers,  instead,  the  joy  of  pro- 
ductive achievement  and  of  noble  comradeship  in  the  pro- 
ductive life. 

'*To  young  women  also  it  offers  toil,  study,  frugal  fare, 
and  plain  clothes,  such  as  befit  those  who  are  honored  with 
a  great  and  difficult  task.  It  offers  also  the  pains,  the  bur- 
dens, and  responsibilities  of  motherhood.  It  offers  also  the 
obligation  of  perpetuating  in  succeeding  generations  the 
principles  of  the  productive  life  made  manifest  in  them- 
selves. It  does  not  offer  the  insult  of  a  life  of  pride  and 
vanity.  It  offers  the  joy  of  achievement,  of  self-expression, 
not  alone  in  dead  marble  and  canvas  but  also  in  the  plastic 
lives  of  children,  to  be  shaped  and  moulded  into  those  ideal 
forms  of  mind  and  heart  which  their  dreams  have  pictured. 
To  them  also  it  opens  up  the  joy  of  productive  achievement 
and  the  noble  comradeship  of  the  productive  life.'^ 

This  does  not  mean  that  there  are  no  possibilities  of 
material  reward  in  the  new  type  of  agriculture  to  which 
young  men  and  women  are  called.  During  the  last  two 
generations,  owing  to  the  rapid  opening  of  the  Western 
lands,  agriculture  has  been  so  depressed  that  many  farm- 
ers have  felt  discouraged.  They  have  seemed  to  be  pouring 
their  lives  into  a  soil  which  drank  it  up  and  gave  little  in  re- 


86  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

turn.  Thus  the  strenuous  life  of  the  farmer  was  robbed,  in 
part  at  least,  of  the  joy  of  achievement.  He  could  not  al- 
ways see  that  he  was  achieving  anything.  That  condition 
is  now  at  an  end.  Henceforth  the  growing  power  of  con- 
sumption and  the  retarded  expansion  of  our  farm  area 
will  give  the  farmers  who  know  how  to  adjust  themselves 
to  the  new  situation  a  more  ample  reward  for  their  labor. 
Nevertheless,  every  farm  will  continue  to  cry,  like  the 
daughters  of  the  horse-leech:  ^'Give,  give.'*  The  more  pro- 
ductive it  is  the  greater  will  be  the  opportunity  for  further 
investment  of  labor  and  capital  in  its  improvement.  The 
farmer  will  find  little  encouragement  for  a  life  of  ease  and 
luxury.  They  who  desire  that  kind  of  life  will  continue  to 
go  to  town.  They  will  be  bought  out  by  those  who  retain 
their  strenuosity  and  their  faith  in  the  productive  life.  To 
such  as  these  the  world  belongs. 

rV.    The  Free  Farmer  and  CoNSOLroATioN 

The  Small  Farmer. — One  of  the  most  important  of  all 
economic  problems  is  the  preservation  of  the  prosperity  of 
the  small  farmer  who  does  most  of  his  own  work  on  his  own 
farm.  His  salvation  depends  upon  his  ability  to  compete 
with  the  large  farmer  or  the  farming  corporation.  Two 
things  threaten  to  place  him  under  a  handicap  and  to  give 
the  large  farmer  an  advantage  over  him  in  competition.  If 
these  two  things  are  allowed  to  operate,  the  big  farmer  will 
beat  him  in  competition  and  force  him  down  to  a  lower 
standard  of  living  and  possibly  to  extinction. 

One  thing  which  would  tend  in  that  direction  is  a  large 
supply  of  cheap  labor.  The  small  farmer  now  has  an  ad- 
vantage because  of  the  difficulty  which  the  big  farmer  has 
in  getting  help.  So  great  is  this  difficulty  that  many  of  the 
bonanza  farmers  are  giving  up  the  fight  and  selling  out  to 
small  farmers.  That  is,  the  big  farms,  the  farms  that  can 
only  be  cultivated  by  gangs  of  hired  laborers,  are  being  di- 


RURAL  ECONOMICS  AND  CONSOLIDATION  2>'J 

vided  up.  Give  the  owners  of  those  farms  an  abundant  sup- 
ply of  cheap  labor — ^make  it  easy  for  them  to  solve  the  prob- 
lem of  efficient  help — and  they  will  begin  again  to  compete 
successfully  with  the  small  farmer,  who,  because  he  does  his 
own  work,  has  no  labor  problem.  If  we  can  keep  conditions 
such  that  the  capitalistic  farmer  has  great  difficulty  in 
getting  help,  the  small  farmer  will  continue  to  beat  him  in 
competition,  and  the  bonanza  farm  will  continue  to  give 
way  to  the  one-family  farm. 

Another  thing  which  threatens  the  prosperity  and  even 
the  existence  of  the  small  farmer  is  the  handicap  under 
which  he  finds  himself  in  buying  and  selling.  The  big 
farmer  who  can  buy  and  sell  in  large  quantities,  and  also 
employ  expert  talent  in  buying  and  selling  and  in  securing 
credit,  has  an  advantage  over  the  small  farmer  who  must 
buy  and  sell  in  small  quantities  and  give  his  time  and  atten- 
tion mainly  to  the  growing  of  crops  rather  than  to,  selling 
them.  Much  of  the  supposed  economy  of  large-scale  pro- 
duction, even  in  merchandising  and  manufacturing,  is  found, 
upon  examination,  to  consist  wholly  in  an  advantage  in 
bargaining,  that  is,  in  buying  and  selling.  When  it  comes 
to  the  work  of  growing  farm  crops,  as  distinct  from  selling 
them  and  buying  raw  materials,  the  one-family  farm  is  the 
most  efficient  unit  that  has  yet  been  found.  But  the  big 
farmer  can  beat  the  individual  small  farmer  in  buying  and 
selling.  It  would  seem  desirable,  from  the  standpoint  of 
national  efficiency,  to  preserve  the  small  farm  as  the  pro- 
ductive unit,  but  to  organize  a  number  of  small  farms  into 
larger  units  for  buying  and  selling.  Thus  we  should  have 
the  most  efficient  units  both  in  producing  and  in  buying 
and  selling. 

If  this  is  not  done,  the  only  farmers  who  can  enter  suc- 
cessfully into  the  production  of  agricultural  specialties, 
where  the  problem  of  marketing  is  greater  than  the  problem 
of  producing,  will  be  the  big  capitalistic  farmers.  The  small 
farmer  may  hold  his  own  in  the  growing  of  staple  crops,  in 


SS  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

which  field  the  problem  of  economic  production  is  perhaps 
greater  than  that  of  efficient  marketing.  The  reason  for 
this  is  that  there  is  a  well-organized  market  for  staple  crops 
and  the  problem  of  marketing  is  therefore  somewhat  less 
difficult  than  in  the  case  of  agricultural  specialties.  But 
even  in  the  growing  of  staple  crops  the  small  farmer  will 
have  a  hard  time  of  it  if  he  is  forced  to  compete  with  the  big 
farm  when  it  is  cultivated  by  gangs  of  cheap  laborers.  The 
two  worst  enemies  of  the  small  farmer  are  the  opponents  of 
co-operative  buying  and  selling,  on  the  one  hand,  and  the 
advocates  of  enlarged  immigration  to  the  rural  districts,  on 
the  other.  The  latter  would  help  the  big  farmer  in  the  buy- 
ing of  labor  for  his  farm,  and  reduce  the  price  of  the  small 
farmer's  own  labor  when  he  undertook  to  sell  it  in  the  form 
of  products. 

Organization  must  be  the  watchword  of  the  small  farmer 
in  the  immediate  future.  He  is  the  one  remaining  person  in 
our  industrial  civilization  who  both  works  with  his  hands 
and  is  self-directed.  He  is  the  only  laborer  who,  in  large 
numbers,  is  his  own  boss.  It  is  our  deliberate  opinion  that 
the  real  strength  of  the  republic  depends  upon  him  more 
than  upon  any  other  one  class.  But  he  will  disappear  unless 
the  Hving  conditions  of  the  country  are  made  attractive  to 
men  who  are  capable  of  self-direction.  If  they  are  not, 
every  man  who  is  capable  of  self-direction  will  leave  the 
country  to  be  tilled  by  men  who  can  only  work  under  the 
direction  of  a  superior. 

Consolidation. — The  key  to  this  situation  is  the  neigh- 
borhood, or  the  rural  community.  The  key  to  the  neighbor- 
hood is  the  rural  school  as  a  community  centre.  But  the 
rural  school  cannot  possibly  function  as  a  community  centre 
unless  there  is  a  community,  and  unless  this  school  is  at,  or 
near,  the  centre.  To  have  several  isolated  district  schools 
scattered  about  over  what  is  really  the  community,  no  one 
of  them  being  by  any  chance  at  the  natural  centre  of  any- 
thing, hinders  this  work  of  community  building  and  this 
makes  impossible  the  building  of  a  genuine  rural  civilization* 


RURAL  ECONOMICS   AND   CONSOLIDATION  89 


PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  From  your  study  of  these  two  chapters  make  a  Hst  of  the  social 

conditions  necessary  or  desirable  for  school  consolidation. 

2.  What  light  do  these  two  chapters  throw  on  methods  of  promoting 

consoHdation? 

3.  In  what  kinds  of  communities  would  consolidation  proposed  by 

school  officials  be  apt  to  fail? 

4.  What  has  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  the  Y.  W.  C.  A.,  the  Red  Cross,  the 

Grange,  or  other  similar  organization  done  to  promote  com- 
munity enlargement  and  ^'getting  together"? 

5.  How  can  the  county  newspapers  and  farm  journals  be  used  to 

show  the  people  what  consolidated  schools  are  doing  and  could 
do? 

6.  In  what  ways  could  an  organization  of  young  men  and  women, 

teachers,  parents,  merchants,  and  professional  men  promote  com- 
munity co-operation  ? 

7.  Why  is  it  sometimes  desirable  to  start  recreational  and  trade  co- 

operation in  such  form  as  community  motion-picture  shows  and 
creameries  before  consoHdation  of  schools  is  attempted? 

8.  What  literature  could  you  procure  to  place  in  the  hands  of  in- 

telligent farmers  that  would  inform  community  leaders  on  con- 
solidation ? 

9.  Why  is  it  desirable  to  have  farmers  themselves  initiate  consolida- 

tion  rather   than   have  it   started  by   the   teacher,    preacher, 
physician,  county  agent,  or  other  such  individual  or  group? 
10.  With  what  opinions  in  the  two  previous  chapters  do  you  disagree? 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Wilson — "Evolution    of    the    Country    Community."      Pilgrim 

Press,  Boston. 

2.  Carver — "Principles  of  Rural  Economics."     Macmillan. 

3.  Rapeer — "Educational  Hygiene,"  chaps.  V  and  VI,  on  co-opera- 

tion.    Scribner. 

4.  Plunkett— "The  Rural  Life  Problem  of  the  United  States."    Mac- 

millan. 

5.  Fiske — "The    Challenge   of    the    Country."     Association    Press, 

New  York. 

6.  Bailey — "The  Country  Life  Movement."     Macmillan. 

7.  Anderson — "The  Country  Town."     Baker  and  Taylor. 

8.  Report  of  the  Country  Life  Commission.     Government  Printing 

Office,  Washington,  D.  C. 


90  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

9.  Butterfield— "The   Country   Church  and  the  Rural  Problem." 
University  of  Chicago  Press. 

10.  Quick— "The  Brown  Mouse."    Bobbs,  Merrill  Co. 

11.  "The  Fairview  Idea."    Bobbs,  Merrill  Co. 

12.  Hayes— "An  Introduction  to  Sociology."    Appleton. 

13.  Wilson— "The  Church  at  the  Centre."    Missionary  Education 

Movement,  New  York. 

14.  Coulter— "Co-operation  Among  Farmers."    Sturgis  and  Walton. 

15.  Rural  Surveys  in  Various  States,  by  the  Board  of  Home  Missions, 

156  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York. 

16.  Monahan — "Consolidation   of    Rural    Schools   and    Transporta- 

tion at  Public  Expense."    Bulletin  of  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Edu- 
cation. 


CHAPTER  V 
SCHOOL  ADMINISTRATION  AND   CONSOLIDATION 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  Reread  the  concluding  section  of  Chapter  I  and  note  the  prin- 

ciples of  rural-school  administration  held  by  prominent  edu- 
cators. 

2.  What  administrative  proposals  are  made  in  Chapter  II  ? 

3.  Why  was  the  district  unit  of  school  control  natural  and  desirable 

in  pioneer  times  before  State  responsibility  for  education  had 
very  much  developed? 

4.  Describe  the  form  of  administrative  control  in  Utah  and  Ohio. 

(See  Foght's  "The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work,"  p.  130.) 

5.  What  States  still  have  the  district  system,  the  county  system,  the 

township,  town,  or  mixed  system?     (See  map  on  next  page.) 

6.  What  States  have  the  most  consolidated  schools?    What  form  of 

administration  do  these  States  have? 

7.  What  recent  contributions  have  been  made  on  a  large  scale  to 

school  support  and  encouragement  of  progress? 

8.  What  are  the  objections  to  a  small  county  board  of  education  in- 

stead of  three  "directors"  for  each  little  school  and  teacher? 

9.  How  can  democracy  and  efficiency  best  be  harmonized  in  this 

matter? 
10.  What  power  have  your  State  and  county  officers  in  promoting 
consolidation  beyond  "agitation"  and  publicity? 

Problems  of  Small  Systems. — Superior  men  and  women 
may  be  able  to  get  along  fairly  well  even  though  they  live  in 
poor,  tumble-down  houses  and  outgrown  forms  of  govern- 
mental control,  but  the  average  run  of  people  are  undoubt- 
edly greatly  helped  in  their  growth  by  favorable  environ- 
mental conditions.  Progressive  communities  in  country 
districts  may  obtain  good  schools,  including  consolidation, 
under  any  form  of  educational  administration,  but  the  evi- 
dence goes  to  show  that  improving  the  general  organization 

91 


93 


SCHOOL  ADMINISTRATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION        93 

and  administration  of  the  schools  decidedly  raises  the  gen- 
eral educational  level. 

It  is  possible  administratively  for  the  State  school  code 
to  make  it  necessary  for  the  State  superintendent  or  com- 
missioner to  hand  out  the  State  appropriations,  for  example, 
in  such  a  way  as  almost  to  demoralize  the  schools,  and  then 
again  it  may  insure  such  an  apportionment  of  the  funds  as 
will  stimulate  the  best  efforts  of  communities  along  the  best 
lines.  Giving  out  school  money  on  the  basis  of  the  number 
of  children  living  in  districts,  regardless  of  whether  they  at- 
tend school  or  not,  fails  to  stimulate  attendance.  Giving  it 
out  partly  (say,  one-third)  on  the  basis  of  the  total  aggre- 
gate number  of  days  attended  by  all  pupils  stimulates 
school  communities  to  get  their  children  to  school  every 
day  in  the  school  year.  Giving  it  out  partly  on  the  basis  of 
the  number  of  teachers  employed  (say,  another  third  or 
more)  frequently  stimulates  school  directors  to  add  another 
teacher  for  an  overcrowded  school.  Reserving  some  of 
the  fund  to  encourage  good  movements,  like  consolidation, 
helps  greatly  to  bring  it  about,  especially  where  the  fund, 
as  in  Minnesota  and  some  other  States,  is  large. 

Where  each  separate  school  in  the  country  is  managed 
by  a  board  of  school  directors  (the  district  system)  we  have 
a  plan  of  administration  that  encourages  the  habit  of  think- 
ing of  each  separate  school  unit  as  an  isolated  thing,  whereas 
if  the  board  of  directors  had  charge  of  ten  to  a  thousand 
schools  they  could  more  readily  consider  bringing  little 
weak  schools  together  at  one  centre  with  or  without  trans- 
portation. 

I.    City  Experimentation  and  Its  Lessons 

City  Experimentation  in  Administration. — We  need 
hardly  explain  and  illustrate  the  principle  that  the  form  of 
administration  we  use  for  a  State  or  county  greatly  modifies 
the  development  of  good  schools.    The  principle  has  been 


94  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

amply  demonstrated  for  many  years.  In  the  last  few  dec- 
ades, in  fact  since  the  industrial  revolution  has  built  up  the 
city  mode  of  living,  administrative  progress  has  been  very 
great  in  these  new  and  congested  centres.  In  Germany  and 
England  the  progress  has  in  many  ways  been  greater  than 
in  our  own  country,  although  we  have  done  a  tremendous 
amount  of  costly  administrative  experimentation.  From 
the  most  decentralized  local  or  ward  political  control  the 
people  have  been  driven  by  hard  experience  to  adopt  one 
after  another  of  the  administrative  measures  which  in  busi- 
ness and  in  European  cities  have  brought  more  efficient  and 
honest  government. 

Cities,  starting  as  small  towns  with  perhaps  a  single 
school  board  for  a  single  school,  have  grown  rapidly  into 
large  municipalities  with  thousands  or  hundreds  of  thou- 
sands of  inhabitants.  Each  new  accession  to  the  city  in  the 
form  of  a  ward  or  a  school  has  had  its  representative  board 
of  directors.  Frequently  there  have  been  as  many  or  more 
directors  than  teachers,  even  as  in  rural  districts  in  many 
States  there  are  three  times  as  many  able-bodied  men  as 
directors  and  managers  as  there  are  teachers.  Board  mem- 
bers have  multiplied  in  many  cities  until  over  a  hundred 
members  have  tried  to  manage  the  schools  at  one  time;  the 
city  territory  has  in  some  cases  spread  over  an  entire 
county. 

Too  Many  Cooks  Spoil  the  Broth. — The  results  almost 
inevitably  have  been  in  city  after  city  the  ruination  of  the 
schools  and  wide-spread  failure  to  furnish  education  of  the 
right  kinds  and  where  it  was  most  needed.  Where  the  dif- 
ferent local  members  have  met  as  a  central  board  the  situ- 
ation has  been  little  improved  over  the  purely  local  system 
if  at  all.  Members  have  got  into  each  other's  way;  the 
board  meeting-room  has  been  turned  into  an  oratorical  hall 
in  which  to  play  to  the  galleries,  talk  for  the  newspapers, 
and  to  do  business  so  formally,  or  with  so  many  committees, 
that  much  business  was  lost  in  the  red  tape;  members  have 


SCHOOL  ADMINISTRATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION        95 

fought  and  "log-rolled"  for  their  respective  localities,  fre- 
quently getting  schools  built  where  they  were  not  needed 
in  order  to  boost  land  values  or  their  own  prestige  while 
other  schools  in  the  city  were  overcrowded  and  on  part  time; 
teachers  have  been  employed  because  they  had  friends  on 
the  board  rather  than  for  teaching  efficiency;  politics  have 
ruled  to  such  an  extent  that  the  best  men  would  not  be- 
come members  of  such  an  organization;  in  general,  there 
has  been  a  great  lack  of  that  business  efficiency  which 
American  business  men  of  the  best  type  have  been  evolving 
in  their  great  industries  for  a  half  century. 

We  need  not  stop  to  give  particular  illustrations  of  the 
inefficiency  of  such  a  system.  As  the  needs  for  real  school- 
ing became  more  manifest  and  the  expenses  of  the  schools 
grew  until  they  became  a  burden,  cities  began  to  call  for 
efficiency  in  public-school  administration,  and  they  have 
obtained  it  chiefly  by  centralizing  control:  lessening  the 
number  of  directors,  getting  them  elected  or  appointed  at 
large,  from  any  part  of  the  city,  arranging  for  them  to  limit 
themselves  to  legislative  work  and  hiring  executives  to  do 
the  work  of  superintending  and  supervising  schools  and 
carrying  on  the  business  end  of  the  work.  Boards  were 
reduced  from  as  high  as  one  hundred  and  forty-six  members 
to  five,  and  three  members  on  a  large  city  board  with  hun- 
dreds of  teachers  to-day  is  not  uncommon.  Now  we  can 
get  some  of  the  best  men  of  the  city  to  serve  without  pay; 
they  can  meet  around  a  table  in  a  small  room  with  a  few 
chairs  about  for  auditors,  and  can  despatch  legislative  work 
as  it  is  done  in  the  best  business  concerns  of  the  day.  In 
some  cases,  as  in  New  York  City,  the  local  boards  have 
been  kept  as  school  visitors  and  advisers  of  the  principals 
and  central  board.  The  people  have  not  felt  with  time  that 
they  have  lost  any  democratic  privileges  or  responsibilities 
which  they  should  bear.  The  schools  have  prospered  as 
never  before,  and  a  new  era  in  school  administration  in  cities 
has  taken  place.    The  recent  surveys  have  helped  greatly 


96  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

in  facilitating  these  changes  in  many  cities  that  had  not 
whole-heartedly  gone  over  to  the  new  system. 

Centralization  in  the  Country. — Another  reason  for  the 
greater  centralization  has  been  the  increase  of  population. 
When  people  were  scattered  about  over  the  land  and  schools 
were  separate  and  isolated  from  one  another,  the  thought 
of  handling  several  of  them  as  a  group  did  not  rise.  Still 
another  reason  has  been  the  relative  decrease  in  the  size 
of  the  country  with  the  invention  of  all  the  many  new 
means  of  bringing  people  together  and  into  closer  communi- 
cation. It  was  harder  to  travel  over  one  district  or  town- 
ship in  the  early  days  than  it  is  in  most  cases  to  travel  over 
a  whole  county  or  very  large  city  now.  Telephones,  tele- 
graphs, railroads,  trolley-cars,  automobiles,  increasingly 
better  roads,  free  mail  and  parcel-post  delivery  at  our 
doors  in  city  or  country,  better  wagons  for  transportation 
of  numbers  of  persons,  such  as  the  coal-heated  busses  and  the 
exhaust-heated  autos,  have  all  worked  together  to  banish 
isolation  and  to  bring  great  numbers  of  people  over  large 
areas  into  quite  close  and  intimate  touch  with  each  other. 
The  world  as  a  great  human  brotherhood  is  rapidly  ap- 
proaching, even  by  the  aid  of  terrible  wars.  But  "co- 
operation is  becoming  more  than  a  belligerent  virtue.'* 
The  administration  of  all  the  schools  in  large  areas,  hundreds 
of  square  miles  in  extent,  is  as  inevitable  as  has  been  the 
integration  of  administration  in  cities. 

II.     The  Three  Systems  of  Control 

The  district  system  with  its  purely  local  control  was 
fairly  satisfactory  for  pioneer  life.  With  the  growth  of 
population  and  modern  improvements  and  inventions  it 
must  give  way  to  more  efficient  forms.  Cubberley  summa- 
rizes some  of  the  chief  faults  of  the  district  system  as  follows : 

The  chief  objections  to  the  district  system  of  school  organization 
are  that  it  is  no  longer  so  well  adapted  to  meet  present  conditions  and 


SCHOOL  ADMINISTRATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION        97 

needs  as  are  other  systems  of  larger  scope;  that  the  district  authorities 
but  seldom  see  the  real  needs  of  their  schools  or  the  possibilities  of 
rural  education;  that  as  a  system  of  school  administration  it  is  expen- 
sive, short-sighted,  inefficient,  inconsistent,  and  unprogressive;  that 
it  leads  to  great  and  unnecessary  inequalities  in  schools,  terms,  edu- 
cational advantages,  and  to  an  unwise  multiplication  of  schools;  that 
the  taxing  unit  is  too  small,  and  the  trustees  too  penurious;  that 
trustees  because  they  hold  the  purse-strings,  frequently  assume  au- 
thority over  many  matters  which  they  are  not  competent  to  manage; 
and  that  most  of  the  progress  in  rural-school  improvement  has  been 
made  without  the  support  and  often  against  the  opposition  of  the 
trustees  and  of  the  people  they  represent.  .  .  .  This  large  number  of 
school  ojSicers  stands  to-day  as  one  of  the  most  serious  blocks  in  the 
way  of  progressive  educational  action.^ 

The  district  system  is  doomed  in  American  schools. 
In  the  last  few  years  many  States  have  tried  to  make  the 
change  over  to  the  township  or  county  system  and  a  large 
number  have  succeeded,  especially  in  getting  the  county 
unit.  Consolidation  cannot  flourish  under  the  district  sys- 
tem. It  takes  outside  agencies  to  get  the  various  school 
directors,  usually  three  to  each  little  one-room  school,  to- 
gether and  to  agree.  Indiana  with  the  township  system  and 
with  hundreds  of  consolidated  schools  and  Illinois  just 
across  the  line  with  the  district  system  and  very  few  illus- 
trate the  point.  New  York  has  recently  advanced  to  the 
township  stage,  and  then  unfortunately  receded  to  the  in- 
efficient district  system,  but  not  for  long.  Under  such  a 
system  the  county  superintendent  is  politically  elected  and 
has  Kttle  real  influence  or  power  to  educate  directors  up 
to  an  appreciation  of  the  value  of  a  change.  If  he  has  un- 
usual power,  his  directors  are  too  many  and  too  changing  for 
him  to  meet  and  influence  during  his  brief  tenure  of  office. 

In  making  the  change  over  to  the  larger  unit  of  adminis- 
tration there  is  sometimes  expressed  the  natural  fear  that 
there  will  be  less  democracy,  less  interest  in  and  control 
over  the  schools  by  the  people.    The  answer  is  that  the  pres- 

» "Rural  Life  and  Education,"  p.  184. 


98  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

ent  interest  in  schools  in  the  district  or  even  in  the  township 
could  hardly  be  worse  than  it  is,  and  that  it  certainly  is 
little  greater  than  if  the  county  were  the  unit.  Further- 
more, democracy  and  interest  do  not  depend  greatly  upon 
the  piecemeal  character  of  the  control  and  participation. 
The  schools  are  still  to  be  managed  for  the  people,  by  the 
people,  and  of  the  people.  Their  control  over  their  repre- 
sentatives for  an  entire  township  or  county  is  not  less  and 
frequently  far  more  than  of  the  individuals  of  the  Httle 
school  community,  and  they  are  able  to  demand  and  ob- 
tain far  superior  schools  in  the  main.  There  are  manifold 
opportunities  to  share  in  the  Hfe  and  teaching  of  the  school 
if  the  people  will  participate  in  the  many  ways  possible 
aside  from  direct  management.  While  there  are  possibly 
some  dangers  for  the  remote  future  of  democracy  in  cen- 
tralization over  a  larger  area,  yet  we  feel  that  it  is  desir- 
able to  take  this  one  step  which  appears  clearly  necessary 
and  rest  assured  that  democracy  will  meet  the  larger  prob- 
lem. If  democracy  means  a  wider  sharing  of  common  in- 
terests and  activities,  then  a  county  system  with  a  series 
of  consolidated  schools  directed  by  real  leaders  and  with 
means  at  hand  for  getting  the  people  together  to  share  in 
a  larger  and  richer  community  and  county  life  may  easily 
give  farmers  more  real  democracy  than  the  hundreds  of  lit- 
tle individualistic  and  isolated  schools  without  leadership 
and  agencies  for  bringing  the  people  together. 

The  township  system  has  several  advantages.  In  the 
East  it  is  called  the  town  system.  In  Indiana  a  single 
school  trustee  manages  the  schools  of  the  township,  such  as 
are  not  separate  districts  under  separate  boards  within  the 
township.  In  Pennsylvania  each  township  outside  of  in- 
corporated boroughs  with  their  own  boards  and  superin- 
tendents or  supervising  principals  has  a  board  of  school  di- 
rectors elected  for  six-year  terms.  In  Massachusetts  the 
town  is  not  bounded  by  straight  longitudinal  and  latitu- 
dinal lines  drawn  without  reference  to  natural  features,  such 


Studying  alfalfa  at  first-hand 


Learning  to  judge  cattle  in  club  work 


A  home  project  with  seed  corn 
This  is  the  education  which  administration  must  facilitate 


SCHOOL  ADMINISTRATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION        99 

as  streams  and  mountains,  but  is  the  country  about  one  or 
several  small  villages  or  even  rather  large  cities.  These 
villages  and  cities  are  not  independent,  but  are  taxed  for  the 
country  schools,  and  all  share  alike.  Investigations  of  the 
best  and  most  equitable  apportionment  of  school  taxes  and 
responsibilities  of  public  education  show  that  this  is  more 


showing  Ttaf 
rious  Districts 
Cenixr  CountvPa 


just  than  the  system  where  the  village  or  larger  place  is 
separate  entirely  in  taxation.  Education  is  a  kind  of  com- 
modity that  does  not  stay  put.  If  you  pay  taxes  for  a  fire 
department,  street-lighting,  or  anything  of  the  kind,  you  get 
what  you  pay  for  and  it  remains  in  your  town  thereafter. 
When  a  community  pays  for  the  schooling  of  a  child  he 
frequently,  and  we  might  say  usually  in  America,  does  not 
remain  to  live  and  work  where  he  obtained  his  schooling. 

We  are  a  migratory  people.  The  country  and  the  village 
community  frequently  suffer  most  since  they  educate  pupils 
who  later  go  to  the  cities.  The  cities  have  more  property 
belonging  to  the  entire  State  economically  to  tax  and  thus 
get  large  sums  of  money  by  a  low  millage.  The  maximum 
limit  for  cities  of  the  first  class  may  be  six  mills,  while  for 
rural  communities  it  is  twenty-five  mills.     Even  then  the 


lOO  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

rural  district  frequently  cannot  get  enough  money  for  good 
schools.  The  city  makes  a  smaller  relative  sacrifice  for 
schooling  and  yet  it  gets  free  of  cost  the  product  of  several 
years'  school  of  the  country  and  small  town.  The  drift  is 
practically  all  cityward.  These  and  many  other  considera- 
tions, such  as  the  fact  that  schools  are  not,  like  most  public 
utihties,  local  affairs  but  are  strictly  State  institutions, 
getting  their  rights  and  powers  from  the  State  as  a  whole, 
lead  to  an  appreciation  of  the  town  system  of  New  England 
which  taxes  all  and  unites  all  of  a  natural  community  with 
farms  and  central  towns  and  stores  and  makes  all  share 
alike  in  educating,  or  at  least  schooling,  the  children.  The 
value  of  such  an  organization  has  been  well  brought  out  by 
Professors  Wilson  and  Carver  in  preceding  chapters. 

Yet  even  such  natural  districts  may  be  too  small  or  may 
fail  to  fit  a  scientific  plan  of  consolidation  over  a  wide  terri- 
tory. The  best  plan  for  the  development  of  consolidation 
is  to  have  thorough  surveys  of  areas  at  least  as  large  as 
counties,  which  of  course  vary  very  greatly  in  size,  and  then 
plan  very  carefully  for  future  consolidation,  where  it  is 
desirable,  plotting  desirable  transportation  routes  and  in- 
dicating the  location  of  the  consolidated-school  plants. 
Where  the  township  has  not  followed  natural  lines,  such  as 
rivers,  mountain  ranges,  and  the  outlines  of  the  community 
trading  at  one  centre,  as  in  a  great  part  of  the  West  where 
townships  are  bounded  by  six-mile  sides  regardless  of 
physiographical  or  social  conditions,  the  limitations  of  this 
unit  of  administration  become  clearly  apparent.  While  the 
township  is  better  than  the  district  system,  it  is  not  big 
enough  for  the  new  consolidation  and  concentration  taking 
place.  In  most  States  the  governmental  unit  is  the  county, 
and  the  tendency  is  strong  for  all  to  use  the  same  unit. 
There  is  no  good  reason  for  keeping  the  schools  on  a  smaller, 
narrower  base  than  the  general  government,  and  we  proph- 
esy that  States  with  township  systems  will  have  either  to 
establish  the  county  system  or  make  many  changes  to  pro- 


SCHOOL  ADMINISTRATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION'     lOI 

cure  the  advantages  of  the  larger  unit  and  escape  the  dis- 
advantages of  the  smaller. 

The  County  Unit. — A  strong  State  control  of  education 
is  everywhere  necessary.  The  whole  educational  system  is 
the  child  of  the  State,  not  of  the  federal  government  nor 
of  the  local  community,  district,  township,  or  county.  We 
have  our  State  school  laws,  and  these  supersede  all  others. 
For  administrative  efficiency  the  governmental  work  of  the 
State  is  divided  into  counties.  In  the  county  the  most  im- 
portant and  expensive  activity  is  that  of  public  education. 
It  has  the  largest  force  of  government  workers  in  the  form 
of  teachers,  and  we  may  naturally  expect  in  every  State  the 
county,  large  or  small,  to  administer  all  the  schools  as  a 
unit.  There  is  opposition  to  these  larger  units  by  those 
whose  taxes  will  be  raised,  or  who  fear  they  will  be  raised,  by 
those  who  oppose  any  change,  and  by  those  who  will  lose 
some  of  their  official  powers.  The  county  system  permits 
of  a  small  county  board  of  education,  instead  of  many 
boards,  from  which  we  could  expect  broad-minded  views  and 
administration  of  consolidation.  It  permits  of  a  county 
superintendent  free  from  party  politics  appointed  by  the 
board  from  among  the  educators  of  the  State  or  nation,  and 
from  him  we  could  expect  efficient  leadership  in  consolida- 
tion. It  would  make  possible  taxation  of  the  entire  county 
for  the  schools  of  the  entire  county,  and  obliterate  some  of 
the  great  inequalities  of  opportunity  offered  in  poor  and 
rich  districts  or  districts  happening  to  be  traversed  by  rail- 
roads or  containing  mines  to  be  taxed.  Cubberley  has  well 
expressed  the  general  plan  of  county  school  administration 
in  his  various  books,  and  since  not  only  State  aid  and  im- 
proved State  apportionment  of  school  funds  but  the  county 
unit  are  desirable  for  the  best  development  of  rural  educa- 
tion through  the  consolidated  school,  we  beg  here  to  set 
forth  his  general  plan: 


ICX2    *  tHE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

III.     Plan  of  County  Administration  Desirable  for 
Consolidation 

Details  of  a  County-Unit  Plan. — Good  principles  of  edu- 
cational organization  and  administration  would  indicate 
approximately  the  following  as  a  desirable  form  for  county 
educational  reorganization: 

/.    General  Control.^ 

1.  The  consolidation,  for  purposes  of  administration,  of  all  schools 
in  a  county,  outside  of  cities  having  city  superintendents  of  schools, 
into  one  county  school  district. 

2.  The  election  of  a  county  board  of  education  of  five  represen- 
tative citizens,  from  the  county  at  large  and  for  five-year  terms,  the 
first  board  however  to  so  classify  themselves  that  the  term  of  one 
shall  expire  each  year  thereafter.  This  board  to  occupy  for  the  schools 
of  the  county  approximately  the  same  position  as  a  city  board  of  edu- 
cation does  for  a  city. 

3.  Each  county  board  of  education  to  seek  out  and  elect  a  well- 
trained  professional  expert  to  act  as  a  county  superintendent  of 
schools,  and  to  fix  his  salary.  Such  officer  to  enjoy  approximately  the 
same  tenure,  rights,  and  privileges  as  a  city  superintendent  of  schools, 
and  to  have  somewhat  analogous  administrative  and  supervisory 
duties  and  responsibilities. 

4.  Each  county  board  of  education  to  hold  title  to  all  school  prop- 
erty, outside  of  separately  organized  city  school  districts,  with  power 
to  purchase,  sell,  build,  repair,  and  insure  school  property. 

5.  Each  county  board  of  education  to  act  also  as  the  board  of 
control  for  any  county  high  schools,  county  vocational  schools,  county 
agricultural  high  schools,  and  the  county  library,  and  to  have  power 
to  order  established  such  types  of  special  schools  as  may  seem  neces- 
sary or  desirable. 

*  In  chap.  X  of  Cubberley*s  "Rural  Life  and  Education,"  drawings  show- 
ing a  number  of  counties  before  and  after  reorganization  are  given  also;  while 
in  Appendix  D  of  his  "State  and  County  Educational  Reorganization,"  a  county 
containing  a  city,  five  towns,  and  one  hundred  and  three  rural  districts  is  shown 
in  one  drawing,  and  in  another  as  reorganized  into  one  city  school  district  and 
one  county-unit  school  district,  the  latter  subdivided  into  fourteen  attendance 
subdistricts,  with  a  graded  consolidated  school  and  a  partial  or  complete  high 
school  attached  in  each.  Full  statistics  as  to  teachers,  costs,  and  tax  rates  for 
this  county  are  also  given. 


SCHOOL  ADMINISTRATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION      I03 

6.  Each  county  board  of  education  to  be  directed  to  order  a  care- 
ful educational  and  social  survey  of  its  county,  and  upon  the  basis  of 
such  to  proceed  to  reorganize  the  school  system  of  the  county  by  abol- 
ishing all  unnecessary  small  schools,  substituting  therefor  a  few  cen- 
trally located  and  graded  consohdated  schools,  with  partial  or  com- 
plete high  schools  attached,  and  to  transport  children  to  and  from 
these  central  schools.  Each  such  school  and  its  tributary  territory  to 
be  known  as  an  attendance  subdistrict,  the  bounds  of  which  may  be 
changed  from  time  to  time  as  in  the  case  of  city  attendance  lines. 

7.  Each  county  board  of  education  to  have  power  to  appoint, 
either  alone  or  in  co-operation  with  a  city  school  district,  or  some 
adjoining  county  school  district,  a  school  health  officer,  a  school  at- 
tendance officer,  and  such  other  special  officers  or  supervisors  as  the 
educational  needs  of  the  county  school  district  may  seem  to  require, 
and  to  establish  or  join  in  the  establishment  of  special  type  schools. 

//.    Educational  Control. 

1.  Each  county  school  district  to  be  managed  as  an  educational 
and  financial  unit  by  the  county  board  of  education  and  its  executive 
officers.  Cities  contained  within  the  county,  which  maintain  a  full 
elementary  and  secondary  school  system,  employing  a  certain  number 
of  teachers  (for  example,  twenty-five)  and  a  city  superintendent  of 
schools,  may  ask  for  and  obtain  a  separate  educational  organization, 
except  that  all  general  school  laws  of  the  State  shall  apply,  and  that 
the  county  school  tax  shall  be  levied  uniformly  on  all  property  within 
the  county. 

2.  On  the  recommendation  of  the  county  superintendent  of  schools, 
each  county  board  of  education  is  to  appoint  all  principals  and  teachers 
for  the  different  schools  of  the  county,  outside  of  the  separately  or- 
ganized city  school  districts,  and  to  fix  and  order  paid  their  salaries. 

3.  On  the  recommendation  of  the  county  superintendent  of  schools, 
each  county  board  of  education  is  to  approve  the  courses  of  study  and 
text-books  to  be  used  in  the  schools,  the  unit  for  the  adoption  of  each 
being  the  unit  of  supervision. 

4.  Each  county  board  of  education  to  approve  the  employment  of 
special  teachers  and  supervisors  for  the  schools,  and,  on  recommenda- 
tion of  the  county  superintendent  of  schools,  to  appoint  them,  and  to 
fix  and  order  paid  their  salaries. 

5.  Each  county  board  of  education  to  have  charge  of  the  county 
library,  and  all  of  its  branches,  to  appoint  a  county  librarian  and  as- 
sistant librarians,  and  to  provide  for  the  care  and  development  of  the 
library  and  the  circulation  of  books.  The  school  libraries  would  be- 
come a  part  of  the  county  library,  and  a  branch  library  would  be  pro- 
vided for  in  connection  with  most  of  the  consolidated  schools. 


I04  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

///.     Business  and  Clerical  Control. 

1.  Each  county  board  of  education  shall  appoint  a  secretary  and 
business  manager,  who  shall  act  as  secretary  for  the  board  and  shall 
have  charge  of  the  clerical,  statistical,  and  financial  work  connected 
with  the  administration  of  the  schools  of  the  county  school  district. 
He  is  to  approve  all  warrants  drawn  on  the  funds  of  the  county,  and 
to  prepare  the  financial  and  statistical  portions  of  the  required  annual 
school  report. 

2.  The  secretary  of  the  county  board  of  education  to  have  general 
charge  of  all  purchases  of  supplies  for  the  schools  and  the  distribution 
of  the  same,  and  to  have  general  oversight  of  all  janitor  service  and 
repair  work,  except  as  otherwise  provided  for  by  the  county  board  of 
education. 

3.  For  each  consolidated  school  or  small  school  retained  (atten- 
dance subdistrict)  the  county  board  of  education  to  appoint  one  local 
school  director,  to  act  as  agent  of  the  county  board  in  the  attendance 
subdistrict,  and  with  power  to  make  repairs  as  directed,  see  that  the 
necessary  supplies  are  provided,  assist  the  principal  or  teachers  in 
the  maintenance  of  discipline,  and  act  as  a  means  of  communication 
between  the  people  whose  children  attend  the  school  and  the  county 
board  of  education  and  its  executive  officers. 

4.  The  secretary  of  each  county  board  of  education-  to  be  the 
custodian  of  all  legal  papers  belonging  to  the  county  school  district; 
to  approve  all  bills  and,  when  such  have  been  ordered  paid,  to  draw 
warrants  for  the  same;  to  give  all  required  notices;  administer  oaths; 
sign  contracts  as  directed  by  the  board;  register  all  teachers*  certif- 
icates; distribute  blank  forms  and  collect  and  tabulate  the  statistical 
returns;  keep  a  complete  set  of  books  covering  all  financial  transactions 
and  all  funds;  and  perform  such  other  clerical  and  statistical  functions 
as  he  may  be  directed  to  do. 

5.  Each  county  board  of  education  to  approve  an  annual  budget 
of  expenses  for  the  schools  of  the  county,  both  for  school  maintenance 
and  for  buildings  and  repairs,  and  may  order  levied,  within  certain 
legal  limits,  a  county  school  district  tax  to  supplement  the  funds  re- 
ceived from  the  State  school  tax  and  the  county  school  tax,  the  latter 
to  be  levied  on  all  property  in  the  county  and  divided  between  the 
city  school  district  and  the  county  school  district  on  some  equitable 
apportionment  basis. ^ 

^  This  greatly  simplifies  and  equalizes  taxation.  Under  such  a  plan  there 
would  be  a  State  tax  (or  appropriation)  for  education,  a  general  county  school 
tax  levied  on  all  property  in  the  county,  and  then  such  city-district  or  county- 
district  taxes  as  may  be  needed  to  supplement  the  amounts  received  from  State 
and  county  funds.  The  inequalities  of  the  present  small  district  taxation 
would  be  abolished,  and  a  pooling  of  effort  on  a  large  scale  substituted  instead. 


SCHOOL  ADMINISTRATION  AND   CONSOLIDATI^      I05 

6.  Each  county  treasurer  to  act  as  treasurer  for  all  city  or  county 
school  districts  in  his  county,  and  to  pay  out  all  funds  on  the  orders 
of  the  proper  city  or  county  school  district  authorities,  when  approved 
by  the  secretary  of  the  county  board  of  education. 

IV.     Powers  and  Duties  of  the  Superintendent. 

In  addition  to  those  previously  enumerated,  the  county  super- 
intendent of  schools  is: 

1.  To  act  as  the  executive  officer  of  the  county  board  of  educa- 
tion, and  to  execute,  either  in  person  or  through  subordinates,  all 
educational  policies  decided  upon  by  it. 

2.  To  act  as  the  chief  educational  officer  in  the  county,  and  as  the 
representative  of  the  state  educational  authorities.  To  this  end  he 
shall  see  that  the  school  laws  of  the  State  and  the  rules  and  regulations 
of  the  State  board  of  education  are  carried  out. 

3.  To  have  supervisory  control  of  all  schools  and  libraries  under 
the  county  board  of  education,  and  general  supervisory  control  of  all 
officers  in  its  employ,  with  power  to  outline,  direct,  and  co-ordinate 
their  work,  and,  for  cause,  to  recommend  their  dismissal. 

4.  To  nominate  for  election,  and  when  elected  to  assign,  transfer, 
and  suspend  all  teachers  and  principals,  and,  for  cause,  recommend 
the  promotion  or  dismissal  of  such. 

5.  To  visit  the  schools  of  the  county,  to  advise  and  assist  teachers 
and  principals,  to  hold  teachers'  meetings  and  institutes,  to  direct  the 
reading-circle  work  in  his  county,  and  to  labor  in  every  practicable 
way  to  improve  educational  conditions  within  his  county. 

6.  To  act  as  the  agent  for  the  State  department  of  education 
in  the  examining  and  certificating  of  teachers,  and  to  decide,  upon 
appeal  to  him,  all  disputes  arising  within  the  county  as  to  the  in- 
terpretation of  the  school  law  or  the  powers  and  duties  of  school 
officers. 

7.  To  oversee  the  preparation  of  the  courses  of  study  and  to  ap- 
prove the  same,  to  study  the  educational  work  done  in  the  schools, 
and  to  approve  for  purchase  all  text  and  supplemental  books  and  all 
apparatus  and  supplies. 

8.  To  recommend  changes  in  the  distribution  or  the  organization 
of  the  schools,  to  recommend  the  establishment  of  new  schools  or 
branch  libraries,  and  to  assist  in  the  correlation  of  the  work  of  the 
schools  with  that  of  the  libraries,  agricultural  activities,  and  other 
forms  of  educational  service. 

9.  To  prepare  and  issue  an  annual  printed  report  showing  the 
work,  progress,  and  needs  of  the  schools  of  the  county. 


Io6  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Such  a  Reorganization  Not  Easy. — To  inaugurate  such  a 
reorganization  will  require  that  the  methods  of  three  gen- 
erations and  the  selfish  interests  of  individuals  and  com- 
munities will  need  to  be  overcome.  Such  a  fundamental 
reorganization,  too,  cannot  be  expected  to  come  through  the 
voluntary  co-operation  of  district  authorities,  upon  which 
we  have  so  far  placed  our  chief  hope.  District  authorities 
are  too  short-sighted,  and  know  too  little  as  to  fundamental 
rural  or  educational  needs.  Neither  can  we  expect  much  as- 
sistance from  the  average  politically  elected  county  super- 
intendent. The  system  of  which  he  is  a  product  too  often  to 
him  seems  a  sacred  system,  and,  in  the  district-system 
States,  he  is  too  afraid  of  the  enemies  he  may  make  in  the 
districts,  and  the  opportunities  he  may  give  an  opponent  to 
defeat  him  for  re-election,  to  render  much  service  looking  to 
any  fundamental  reorganization  of  rural  education. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  What  steps  are  necessary  or  desirable  in  your  State  for  a  larger 

unit  of  school  control  and  more  effective  educational  measures? 

2.  Do  your  consolidated  schools  receive  State  aid?    How  much? 

3.  Examine  Cubberiey's  plan  of  county  educational  organization  in 

his  "State  and  County  Educational  Reorganization." 

4.  Summarize  the  features  of  good  rural-school  administration  as 

given  by  Monahan  in  his  bulletin  of  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Edu- 
cation entitled  "County-Unit  Organization  for  the  Adminis- 
tration of  Rural  Schools.'* 

5.  How  many  school  directors  manage  the  schools  of  New  York 

City?  How  do  the  number  of  teachers,  the  value  of  school 
property,  and  the  annual  appropriation  for  schools  compare 
with  the  same  factors  in  the  rural  schools  of  your  State  ?  What 
is  the  difference  in  number  of  directors? 

6.  Is  a  large  territory  necessarily  managed  by  many  boards? 

7.  Give  the  good  and  bad  points  of  the  pure  county  system  as  illus- 

trated by  Louisiana. 

8.  When  a  State  is  cut  up  by  mountains,  as  in  Pennsylvania  or  Mon- 

tana, what  hindrances  to  consolidation  are  occasioned  by  the 
township  system? 


SCHOOL   ADMINISTRATION   AND    CONSOLIDATION       lO 


9.  How  should  consolidated  schools  in  your  State  obtain  their  funds 

and  why  ? 
10.  Is  it  wise  to  have  local  boards  with  very  limited  powers  even  where 
we  have  the  township,  town,  or  county  systems? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Cubberley — "Public    School   Administration."     Houghton    Mif- 

flin Co. 

2.  "State  and  County  Educational  Reorganization."     Mac- 

millan. 

3.  Monahan — "County-Unit  Organization  for  the  Administration  of 

Rural  Schools."     U.  S.  Government  Printing  Office. 

4.  Foght — "  The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work."     Macmillan. 

5.  Surveys  of  Various  States  by  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education. 

6.  Arp — "Rural  Education  and  the  Consolidated  School."     World 

Book  Co. 

7.  Betts  and  Hall— "Better  Rural  Schools."    Bobbs,  Merrill  Co. 

8.  Cubberley — "Rural  Life  and  Education."    Houghton  Mifl^n  Co. 

9.  Flexner  and  Bachman — "Public  Education  in  Maryland."     (A 

survey.)     General  Education  Board,  New  York. 
10.  Monahan — "  Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools  and  Transportation  of 
Pupils  at  Public  Expense."    Government  Printing  Office. 


CHAPTER  VI 
THE  GROWTH  OF  CONSOLIDATION 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  Consolidation  began  about  fifty  years  ago.     Can  you  account  for 

its  rapid  development  in  only  the  last  decade  or  two? 

2.  What  factors  have  contributed  most  to  the  spread  of  consolidation  ? 

3.  What  influences  work  most  to  bring  about  consolidation  in  your 

own  State? 

4.  Why  is  the  consolidation  movement  so  slow  in  some  sections  of  the 

country  where  it  would  be  an  entire  success? 

5.  How  can  such  retarding  influences  be  met? 

I.    The  Beginning  of  the  Consolidation  Movement 

It  seems  desirable  at  this  time  to  set  forth  the  main 
facts  of  consolidation  in  the  United  States.  When  con- 
solidation, as  the  word  is  generally  understood,  began  in  the 
United  States  is  difficult  to  say.  Probably  in  the  older 
States  from  very  early  times  schools  were  abandoned  for 
the  sake  of  economy  and  the  children  sent  to  neighboring 
schools.  In  Massachusetts  sufficient  instances  had  occurred 
previous  to  1869  to  bring  the  question  before  the  State 
legislature  in  that  year  as  to  whether  children  from  an  aban- 
doned school  district  might  be  transported  to  another  dis- 
trict at  public  expense.  The  legislature  acted  favorably 
and  school  trustees  were  authorized  to  pay  for  the  trans- 
portation of  children  to  a  neighboring  district  out  of  the 
school  funds.    The  law  reads  as  follows: 

Any  town  in  the  commonwealth  may  raise  by  taxation  or  other- 
wise and  appropriate  money  to  be  expended  by  the  school  committee 
in  their  discretion  in  providing  for  the  conveyance  of  pupils  to  and 
from  the  public  schools. 

108 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CONSOLn)ATION  ICQ 

Honorable  Joseph  White,  formerly  secretary  of  the  Mas- 
sachusetts State  Board  of  Education,  stated  that  the  act 
was  introduced  into  the  legislature  through  the  efforts  of  a 
practical  man  from  one  of  the  rural  townships  of  large  terri- 
tory and  sparse  population,  where  the  constant  problem  is 
how  to  bring  equal  school  privileges  to  all  without  undue 
taxation.  The  first  children  carried  to  school  at  public  ex- 
pense under  the  provisions  of  this  act  were  in  the  town  of 
Quincy,  in  the  eastern  part  of  the  State,  the  town  in  which 
Colonel  Francis  Parker  gained  his  fame  as  a  progressive 
school  superintendent.  There,  in  1874,  a  school  with  less 
than  a  dozen  children  was  closed  and  the  pupils  carried  to 
another  one-teacher  school,  the  union  making  a  school  not 
too  large  for  one  teacher.  The  district  abandoning  its 
school,  after  paying  tuition  and  transportation  expenses, 
found  that  its  outlay  was  less  than  the  amount  which  would 
have  been  required  to  maintain  the  old  school.  No  special 
educational  advantages  came  to  the  pupils  transported  to 
such  a  union  school,  of  course,  except  from  the  association 
with  a  greater  number  of  children. 

The  Montague  Consolidated  School. — The  first  con- 
solidation for  the  definite  purpose  of  securing  for  the  chil- 
dren better  educational  opportunities  appears  to  have  oc- 
curred in  Montague,  Massachusetts.  There,  in  1875,  as  a 
result  of  a  campaign  conducted  principally  by  one  of  the 
school  committee,  Mr.  Seymour  Rockwell,  three  ^'district" 
schools  were  abandoned  and  a  new  brick  building  was  erected 
at  a  central  location,  to  which  the  children  from  the  aban- 
doned districts  were  transported  at  pubHc  expense.  This 
school  is  still  in  a  flourishing  condition.  It  serves  a  terri- 
tory of  approximately  twenty  square  miles.  A  high-school 
department  was  added  very  soon  after  the  school  was  es- 
tablished and  graduated  its  first  four-year  class  in  1884. 

The  Concord  Consolidated  School. — The  second  con- 
solidated school  in  the  United  States  was  probably  one  es- 
tablished in  Concord,  Massachusetts,  the  home  of  Emerson, 


no  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Hawthorne,  Alcott,  and  others.  A  central  building  was 
erected  in  1879,  replacing  several  one-teacher  schools.  Con- 
cord at  that  time,  with  the  township,  included  about  4,000 
inhabitants.  The  area  was  about  twenty-five  square  miles. 
For  school  administration  purposes  it  was  divided  into  two 
village  districts  and  five  rural  districts.  Prior  to  1879  the 
common  schools  were  twelve  in  number,  occupying  eleven 
houses.  Five  of  these  schools  were  in  the  central  village; 
two,  in  the  same  building,  were  at  West  Concord;  the  re^ 
maining  five  were  in  the  outlying  farming  districts.  The 
district  schoolhouses  were  at  distances  of  from  one  and  a 
half  to  three  miles  from  the  centre.  At  the  centre  was  a 
high  school  to  which  pupils  came  from  all  parts  of  the  town- 
ship. The  new  building  was  appropriately  called  the 
Emerson  School  and  contained  eight  rooms.  When  first 
opened  it  replaced  the  five  schools  of  the  central  village. 
Later  the  other  seven  were  taken  in,  one  at  a  time.  Thus 
both  at  Quincy  and  Concord  we  find  the  consolidated 
school  arising  in  communities  made  intelligent  and  co-opera- 
tive probably  by  their  able  men.  "An  institution  is  but 
the  lengthened  shadow  of  a  man." 


II.    The  Spread  of  Consolidation 

Other  Consolidation  in  Massachusetts. — Following  the 
establishment  of  the  Concord  consolidated  school  came 
others  in  the  neighboring  townships.  By  the  year  1888, 
104  townships  out  of  a  total  of  240  in  the  State  were  spend- 
ing money  for  the  conveyance  of  pupils.  In  the  school  year 
1888-89  the  amount  paid  for  that  purpose  was  $22,118.38. 
In  1891-92,  160  townships  and  cities  were  paying  a  total 
of  $38,726.07  for  transportation.  In  191 2-13  almost  ex- 
actly ten  times  this  amount  was  paid  for  the  same  purpose. 
Finally,  in  1913-14,  the  amount  so  expended  was  $426,- 
274,  and  to-day  it  is  over  a  half  million  dollars. 


THE   GROWTH  OF  CONSOLIDATION  III 

Consolidation  in  Ohio. — The  movement  spread  from 
Massachusetts  to  other  northeastern  States  and  the  West 
and  South,  until  now  it  is  doubtful  if  a  State  can  be  found 
in  the  Union  without  a  number  of  examples  of  successful 
consolidated  schools.  Ohio  and  Indiana  took  hold  of  the 
idea  earlier  than  most  of  the  other  States.  Consolidation 
was  easier  to  establish  in  these  States  than  in  the  great 
majority  of  States,  because  both  Ohio  and  Indiana,  like 
Massachusetts,  were  organized  on  the  township  basis,  al- 
though of  a  different  type. 

The  first  consolidated  school  in  Ohio  was  the  Kings- 
ville  school,  in  Ashtabula  County.  A.  B.  Graham,  in  a 
bulletin  of  the  Ohio  State  University,  says: 

In  1892  the  Kingsville  township  board  of  education  was  confronted 
with  the  necessity  of  providing  a  new  school  building.  Their  schools 
were  small,  and  the  per  capita  expense  was  unduly  large.  It  was 
finally  agreed  to  transport  the  children  of  the  township  to  Kingsville, 
which  was  one  of  the  district  schools  of  the  township.  For  the  cost 
gf  transportation  a  special  bill  was  introduced  into  the  general  as- 
sembly and  became  a  law  April  17,  1894.  The  measure  applied  only 
to  Kingsville  township.  In  the  succeeding  general  assembly  another 
measure  was  passed  for  the  relief  of  the  counties  of  Stark,  Ashtabula, 
and  Portage.  On  April  5,  1898,  the  assembly  passed  a  general  law 
on  the  subject.  In  1897,  one  year  before  the  law  was  made  general, 
Mad  River  township,  in  Champaign  County,  transported  eighteen 
children  to  Westville  rather  than  establish  a  new  subdistrict  and  build 
a  new  schoolhouse.  This  was  the  first  step  toward  establishing  a 
centralized  school  in  western  Ohio. 

A  law  of  Ohio,  approved  April  25,  1904,  authorized  the 
board  of  education  in  any  township  to  suspend  schools  in 
any  or  all  subdistricts  in  the  township  and  convey  pupils  to 
a  centralized  school,  with  the  provision  that  no  school  with 
an  average  daily  attendance  of  twelve  or  more  could  be 
abolished  against  the  opposition  of  the  majority  of  the 
voters  of  the  district.  Following  the  passage  of  this  law  the 
movement  for  consolidation  progressed  rapidly.  In  19 10 
there  were  178  centralized  or  consolidated  schools  in  the 


112  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

State;  49  of  these  were  township  schools  serving  the  entire 
township.  In  191 2  there  were  192  townships  out  of  1,370 
in  the  State  with  their  schools  completely  or  partially  cen- 
tralized. By  1914  there  were  358  consolidated  schools;  by 
191 5  there  were  468;  and  in  1916  there  were  539.  The  last 
few  years,  as  illustrated  later  by  Preble  County,  have  wit- 
nessed greatly  accelerated  progress. 

Consolidation  in  Indiana. — Consolidation  in  Indiana  was 
first  agitated  by  Caleb  Mills  in  1856.  Nothing  of  impor- 
tance, however,  was  done  until  1889,  when  the  legislature 
passed  an  act  recognizing  the  right  of  township  trustees  to 
pay  for  the  transportation  of  pupils  to  consolidated  schools. 
In  191 2  there  were  in  the  State  589  consolidated  schools, 
distributed  in  70  of  the  92  counties  of  the  State.  In  19 14 
there  were  665  consolidated  schools  in  73  of  the  92  counties 
in  the  State,  attended  by  73,404  children,  or  35.9  per  cent 
of  all  the  pupils  attending  rural  schools;  26,403  children 
were  transported  at  an  expense  to  the  public  of  $491,265. 
This  is  approximately  36  per  cent  of  the  children  attending 
the  consolidated  schools.  Between  19 14  and  191 6,  41  ad- 
ditional consolidated  schools  were  established,  making  a 
total  of  706. 

A  study  of  the  consolidated  schools  in  Indiana  by  the 
State  Department  of  Education  in  1916  revealed  clear 
evidences  that  better  educational  opportunities  are  pre- 
sented in  the  consolidated  schools  than  in  other  rural 
schools.  For  instance,  that  better  teachers  are  provided 
is  demonstrated  by  the  fact  that  the  average  daily  wages 
paid  in  consolidated  schools  are  $3.37,  as  compared  with 
$2.76  in  other  rural  schools.  In  spite  of  this  greatly  in- 
creased salary,  the  cost  per  pupil  in  the  consolidated  school 
is  not  much  greater  than  in  the  other  rural  schools,  the 
figures  being  $25.64  and  $22.71  respectively;  an  insig- 
nificant difference  when  considering  the  greatly  increased 
advantages.  The  establishment  of  so  many  consolidated 
schools  has  made  high-school  education  possible  to  country 


THE   GROWTH  OF  CONSOLffiATION  II3 

children  within  easy  reach  of  their  homes.  This  is  evi- 
denced by  the  fact  that  of  the  total  number  of  children  en- 
rolled in  the  consolidated  schools  22  per  cent  are  in  the  high- 
school  departments.  That  Indiana,  after  twenty-five  years 
of  experience  with  such  a  large  number  of  consolidated 
schools,  is  satisfied  with  the  type  of  school  even  when  the 
expense  is  greater  than  that  of  the  old  type  is  evidenced  by 
the  rapidity  with  which  district  schools  are  being  aban- 
doned for  consolidated  schools.  In  the  past  five  years,  for 
example,  the  number  of  schools  abandoned  was  over  one 
thousand.^ 

Consolidation  in  Other  States. — Massachusetts,  Ohio, 
and  Indiana  have  established  up  to  the  present  a  greater 
proportion  of  consolidated  schools  than  any  other  States. 
The  extent  of  the  movement  elsewhere  is  given  in  the  fol- 
lowing pages.  It  will  be  noticed  that  it  has  gone  furthest  in 
States  with  large  administrative  units  for  school  affairs — 
that  is,  in  those  with  the  county  or  the  township  organiza- 
tion; and  that  it  has  made  little  headway  in  States  with  the 
small  *' school-district"  unit,  except  in  a  few  where  a  rela- 
tively large  amount  of  financial  aid  is  given  by  the  State  as 
a  stimulus. 

III.    District,  Township,  or  County  Unit — Which? 

The  Unit  of  Organization  and  Consolidation. — The  de- 
pendence of  the  movement  for  consolidation  upon  the  form 
of  organization  is  well  illustrated  by  the  neighboring  States 
of  Indiana  and  Illinois,  the  first  with  about  706  consoli- 
dated schools,  the  second  with  less  than  40.  Indiana  has 
been  organized  on  the  township  basis  since  1852,  with  all 
the  schools  in  any  township  under  the  control  of  one  agency. 
Illinois  is  organized  on  the  district  basis,  the  district  being 
usually  in  rural  territory,  the  area  served  by  a  single  school. 
Each  district  has  three  trustees  to  manage  the  affairs  of  the 

*  Later  returns  may  be  obtained  from  the  State  Department  of  Education. 


114  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

single  school  and  to  regulate  the  work  of  the  teacher.  The 
State  has  more  than  10,000  one- teacher  schools;  these 
10,000  schools  with  10,000  teachers  are  managed  by  30,- 
000  trustees,  three  directors  for  each  teacher.  Consolida- 
tion under  such  conditions  is  difficult,  since  it  means  the 
formation  of  new  districts  out  of  two  or  more  old  districts, 
which  is  accomplished  only  after  an  adjustment  of  the 
business  affairs  and  of  the  jealousies  of  the  old  districts  has 
been  reached.  Experience  shows  that  sometimes  the  dis- 
trict trustees  are  the  most  difficult  persons  in  the  district 
to  convince  of  the  advantages  of  consolidation.  The  honor 
of  serving  in  their  position  is  sweet  to  them  and  given  up 
reluctantly.  Many  States  are  coming  to  the  conclusion  that 
three  strong  men  are  not  necessary  to  hire  and  manage 
every  young-woman  teacher  and  are  getting  boards  of  five 
for  units  as  large  as  counties. 

The  two  States  organized  for  the  management  of  rural- 
school  affairs  on  the  single-district  basis  which  have  made 
notable  progress  in  consolidation  are  Washington  and 
Minnesota.  Washington  has  paid  from  the  State  school 
funds  to  consolidated  schools  an  annual  bonus  of  $170  for 
each  school  abandoned  less  one.  To  illustrate,  if  six  dis- 
tricts combine  and  establish  a  single  consolidated  school, 
the  new  school  has  received  each  year  from  the  State  five 
times  $170.  In  Minnesota,  previous  to  191 2,  practically  no- 
consolidations  were  effected.  In  191 1  the  legislature  passed 
the  Holmberg  Act,  under  which  consolidated  schools  are 
classified  and  aided  from  State  funds.  The  first  year  un- 
der the  operation  of  the  act  141  old  districts  were  formed 
into  60  new  districts.  In  191 6  the  State  had  220  consoli- 
dated schools  which  replaced  454  schools  of  the  old  type. 
North  Dakota,  Missouri,  Wisconsin,  and  Iowa  adopted,  in 
the  19 13  session  of  their  legislatures,  measures  somewhat 
similar  to  the  Holmberg  Act.  North  Dakota  had  at  this 
writing  401  consolidated  schools,  Missouri  122,  and  Iowa 
211.    The  greater  progress  in  North  Dakota  is  due  to  the 


A  Wyoming  consolidated  school 


A  type  of  many  abandoned  pioneer  schools 


THE   GROWTH  OF   CONSOLmATION  II5 

fact  that  the  State  is  organized  for  school  administration  in 
nearly  all  counties  on  the  larger  township  basis. 

Union  Schools  of  North  Carolina  and  Tennessee, — Both 
North  Carolina  and  Tennessee  made  much  progress  in 
consolidation  immediately  after  the  adoption  of  the  county 
unit  of  administration.  In  ten  years,  under  the  county 
system,  North  Carolina  abolished  1,200  small  districts  and 
replaced  1,200  small  one- teacher  schools  with  less  than  500 
** union"  schools,  each  with  tv/o  or  more  teachers.  To  such 
consolidated  schools  public  transportation  was  not  neces- 
sary, as  the  districts  were  but  from  eight  to  ten  square  miles 
in  area.  Other  consolidations  with  larger  districts  have 
taken  place  since,  and  transportation  is  furnished  to  about 
50  schools.  The  union  schools  frequently  draw  in  sufficient 
one-room  schools  to  become  first-class  consolidated  schools. 

Tennessee,  after  giving  up  the  district  system  in  1903, 
aboHshed  more  than  1,000  small  country  schools  and  re- 
placed them  with  less  than  one-half  as  many  union  schools, 
of  the  same  type  as  those  in  North  Carolina.  The  larger 
consolidated  school  has  been  established  also  in  many  in- 
stances, approximately  60  requiring  transportation  at  public 
expense. 

IV.     Consolidation  in  Semimountainous  Regions 

Consolidation  in  Anderson  County,  Tennessee. — An- 
derson County  recently  completed  an  extensive  plan  of 
providing  consolidated  schools  for  all  children  in  the  county. 
This  is  an  east  Tennessee  county,  directly  west  of  Knox 
County,  in  which  the  city  of  Knoxville  is  located.  It  is 
semimountainous.  In  the  southern  part  the  valleys  are 
broad  and  there  are  good  agricultural  lands ;  in  the  northern 
part  the  valleys  are  narrow  and  the  tillable  land  small  in 
proportion  to  the  total  area.  Coal  is  mined  in  parts  of  the 
county.  In  the  northwest  part  of  the  county  is  located  the 
coal  village  of  Briceville,  which  became  well  known  on  ac- 


Il6  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

count  of  two  separate  explosions  in  mines  in  the  neighbor- 
hood, resulting  in  heavy  loss  of  life.  The  county-seat  is  at 
Clinton,  and  Clinton  has  its  own  school  corporation.  The 
rest  of  the  county  in  school  affairs  is  under  the  county  board 
of  education. 

In  the  county  there  are  now  in  operation  i6  consolidated 
schools,  the  last  9  of  which  were  constructed  and  put  into 
use  the  ist  of  September,  191 5.  Most  of  these  buildings  are 
6-room  buildings  and  serve  a  territory  of  from  8  to  14 
square  miles.  There  is  much  land  on  the  tops  of  the  ridges 
on  which  no  one  is  living.  The  population  is  therefore  col- 
lected in  districts  smaller  than  the  total  areas  served  by 
the  schools.  A  total  of  7  transportation  wagons  are  used 
for  the  16  consolidated  schools.  The  greatest  distance  that 
children  may  be  required  to  walk  in  the  State  is  two  and  a 
half  miles.  These  buildings  are  so  located  that  compara- 
tively few  children  will  be  required  to  walk  more  than  two 
miles.  The  territory  served  by  each  school  stretches  along 
the  valleys  between  the  mountain  ridges,  the  children  com- 
ing almost  wholly  from  two  directions. 

All  but  2  of  the  consolidated  schools  are  brick  buildings. 
The  9  buildings  recently  constructed  cost  approximately 
$50,000,  exclusive  of  equipment.  Eight  of  them  are  ex- 
actly ahke,  with  4  classrooms  located  on  the  ground  floor 
and  2  basement  rooms  half  above  ground,  designed  for 
manual  training,  agriculture,  and  cooking.  From  4  to  9 
teachers  are  required  at  each  school.  Provision  is  made  for 
two  years  of  high-school  work  at  each  school,  in  addition  to 
the  elementary  work.  Manual  training,  agriculture,  or 
household  economics  is  required  of  all  children.  The  school 
lots  are  from  5  to  14  acres  in  extent,  the  land  in  every  case 
being  donated  by  persons  living  in  the  neighborhood.  On  each 
school  site  will  be  provided  a  cottage  for  the  principal  and 
his  family,  and  they  will  be  expected  to  board  the  other 
teachers.  In  several  instances  old  schoolhouses  are  being 
converted  into  cottages.    A  part  of  the  school  grounds  will 


THE   GROWTH   OF  CONSOLIDATION  II7 

be  used  for  school  gardens;  a  large  part,  however,  will  be 
given  to  the  principal  for  his  own  use  with  the  understanding 
that  it  is  to  be  cultivated  as  a  model  farm  for  the  commu- 
nity and  as  a  demonstration  for  the  classes  in  agriculture  in 
the  school.  The  principals  receive  about  the  same  salary 
as  principals  of  similar  schools  elsewhere,  but  in"  addition 
are  furnished  the  cottage  rent  free  and  the  land  for  farming. 

The  school  buildings  and  as  many  of  the  teachers'  cot- 
tsiges  as  are  in  use  serve  as  demonstrations.  Each  build- 
ing is  supplied  with  running-water  piped  from  springs  on 
the  neighboring  hills.  The  teachers'  cottages  are  equipped 
with  modern  bathrooms.  The  people  living  in  the  district 
served  by  the  school  have  an  opportunity  to  see  how  houses 
may  be  provided  with  running-water,  bathrooms,  and  sani- 
tary closets,  and  it  is  expected  that  the  example  will  cause 
the  installation  of  similar  conveniences  in  many  homes. 
Two  of  the  largest  school  buildings  are  heated  by  steam,  the 
others  by  hot  air. 

In  one  of  the  new  buildings  a  separate  auditorium  has 
been  built  from  money  subscribed  by  persons  living  in  the 
neighborhood.  In  all  of  the  other  buildings  an  auditorium 
is  provided  by  throwing  together  two  rooms  ordinarily 
separated  by  a  movable  partition.  The  seating  capacity  of 
the  auditorium  in  the  eight  buildings  is  about  200  each. 

Each  county  in  Tennessee  is  a  unit  in  the  administration 
of  rural-school  affairs.  The  county  board  of  education  has 
power  to  locate  schools  wherever  it  deems  best  and  the 
schools  are  built  from  county  funds  supplied  usually  by  bond 
issue;  the  bond  issue,  however,  must  be  authorized  by  ma- 
jority vote  of  the  qualified  electors  of  the  county.  At  the 
regular  election  in  Clinton  County,  November,  19 14,  a 
bond  issue  of  $50,000  for  new  school  buildings  was  author- 
ized. These  bonds  were  sold  to  the  highest  bidder,  one 
broker  buying  the  entire  lot  at  nearly  $400  premium.  The 
county  board  determined  where  the  new  buildings  should  be 
erected  and  the  kind  of  buildings  to  be  supplied.     When 


Il8  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

these  buildings  were  opened  in  September,  191 5,  16  con- 
solidated schools  replaced  approximately  58  one  and  two 
teacher  schools.  The  county  board  is  following  a  definite 
plan  for  the  consolidation  of  all  schools  in  the  county. 
Its  plans  call  for  28  buildings  for  the  entire  county;  that 
is,  there  are  12  more  to  be  built  at  a  later  date.  It  is 
probable  that  another  bond  issue  for  these  12  buildings  has 
already  been  voted.  The  area  of  the  county  is  approxi- 
mately 350  square  miles.  Each  of  the  28  schools  will  serve, 
therefore,  a  territory  of  approximately  i2>^  miles.  On  ac- 
count of  the  mountainous  character  of  much  of  the  coun- 
try, the  inhabited  territory  served  by  each  school  is  less 
than  this  amount.  Thus  the  argument  that  consolidated 
schools  cannot  be  established  in  mountainous  regions  falls 
flat  through  the  force  of  this  and  similar  examples.  A  long 
mountain  valley  with  a  trading  village  may  be  an  ideal 
consolidated-school  community. 

V.    Recent  Rapid  Progress 

The  consolidated-school  movement  in  all  but  a  rela- 
tively small  number  of  States  is  less  than  two  decades  old. 
In  1900  there  were  very  few  outside  of  Massachusetts,  New 
Hampshire,  Ohio,  and  Indiana.  Since  1900  there  has  been 
an  awakening;  results  came  slowly  at  first,  but  have  come 
very  rapidly  since  19 10.  From  1910  to  1916  there  were 
probably  twice  as  many  consolidated  and  union  schools 
established  as  in  the  sixty  years  before  that  period.  The 
year  191 1  is  notable  in  school  legislation,  because  of  the  laws 
passed  by  a  large  number  of  States  in  that  period  intended 
to  promote  consolidation.  Among  these  is  the  legislation  in 
Minnesota  referred  to  above;  also  of  importance  legislation 
in  Wisconsin,  North  Dakota,  Oklahoma,  Arkansas,  Georgia, 
and  Kentucky.  In  191 2  and  19 13  other  favorable  legis- 
lation was  passed,  several  States,  notably  Iowa,  Wisconsin, 
Missouri,  North  Dakota,  and  South  Carolina,  passing  laws 


A  consolidated  school,  Woodslown,  X.  J. 
Not  as  desirable  as  the  one-story  type  where  land  is  comparatively  cheap 


^^P^ 

ni 

^^^^^^~i^uia, 

P 

From  five  to  twenty  such  structures  may  be  eliminated  by  one  consolidated 

school 


THE   GROWTH  OF  CONSOLIDATION  II 9 

similar  to  those  of  Minnesota,  under  which  special  State 
aid  is  given. 

The  results  in  several  of  these  States  have  already  been 
noted.  In  others  it  is  as  follows:  Arkansas  had  at  this  writ- 
ing 125  consolidated  schools,  practically  all  having  been 
established  in  the  past  five  years;  South  Carolina  had  700 
rural  graded  schools  receiving  special  State  aid  under  the 
act  of  191 2  to  encourage  consolidation  and  graded  schools 
in  country  districts;  Kentucky  had  41  consolidated  schools 
which  replaced  140  one- teacher  schools.  Transportation 
was  furnished  to  14.  Georgia  in  191 5  had  159  consolidated 
schools  to  which  3,123  pupils  were  transported.  There 
were  approximately  40  more  in  19 16. 

VI.    The  Movement  in  Other  States 

How  Louisiana  Began  Consolidation. — The  following  in- 
teresting statement  of  the  beginnings  of  consolidation  in 
Louisiana  is  by  the  State  superintendent  of  public  instruc- 
tion. Louisiana  is  organized  on  the  county  basis,  the  parish 
(county)  board  of  education  having  complete  control  of 
the  educational  affairs  of  the  parish. 

The  consolidation  idea  in  Louisiana  had  its  birth  in  1902,  and  was 
due  to  a  cyclone.  In  the  parish  of  Lafayette  a  cyclone  destroyed  a 
one-room  schoolhouse  located  about  six  miles  from  the  town  of  Scott. 
This  occurred  during  the  session,  and  as  the  building  of  a  new  school- 
house  would  cause  the  children  to  be  out  of  school  for  a  month  or  so, 
two  pubHc-spirited  citizens,  members  of  the  school  board,  Doctor  Moss 
and  Mr.  Judice,  proposed  to  furnish  a  wagonette  temporarily  at  their 
own  expense  to  be  used  in  transferring  the  children  who  had  been  at- 
tending the  little  school  that  was  destroyed  to  the  school  located  in 
the  town  of  Scott.  Their  proposition  was  accepted  by  the  board  and 
the  new  plan  put  into  operation.  The  idea  worked  out  so  success- 
fully that  the  board  decided  not  to  rebuild  the  house,  but  to  put  in  a 
permanent  wagonette.  Other  communities  in  Lafayette  heard  of  the 
new  plan  and  petitioned  the  school  board  to  place  their  children  in 
central  graded  schools.  In  a  year  or  so  Lafayette  parish  had  made 
practically  every  consolidation  that  was  possible  and  was  operating  a 


120  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

large  number  of  wagonettes  in  which  children  were  transported  to 
central  schools.  Gradually  the  idea  worked  out  through  all  parts  of 
the  State,  and  other  parishes  began  trying  the  plan.  The  system  now 
is  general  throughout  Louisiana,  practically  every  parish  in  the  State 
having  consolidated  schools  and  most  of  them  operating  school 
transfers. 

The  number  of  strictly  consolidated  country  schools  (in  191 3)  is 
210,  and  the  number  of  school  wagonettes  in  use  is  259. 


Since  the  above  was  written  the  number  of  consolidated 
schools  has  more  than  doubled. 

Consolidation  in  Mississippi  and  Missouri. — The  rapid- 
ity of  the  movement  in  the  past  few  years  is  indicated  by 
data  from  a  few  States.  That  of  Mississippi  is  interesting. 
In  the  fall  of  1907  the  State  superintendent  appointed  a 
committee  of  three  county  superintendents  to  prepare  a 
report  on  the  subject  of  the  consolidation  of  schools.  This 
report  was  adopted  by  the  association  of  county  superin- 
tendents, and  a  bill  prepared  providing  for  consolidation  and 
transportation  for  the  1908  legislature.  It  failed  to  pass. 
The  bill  was  reintroduced  in  19 10,  amended  and  strength- 
ened, and  passed.  Further  amendments  were  found  neces- 
sary, and  these  were  provided  in  191 2.  As  the  result  of  the 
1910  bill  and  the  191 2  amendments  the  State  has  estab- 
lished more  than  290  consolidated  schools  and  has  more 
than  725  wagons  in  operation. 

In  191 2-13  there  were  organized  75  consolidated  schools, 
with  the  children  transported  in  100  wagons.  The  average 
area  of  these  75  consolidated  districts  is  30  square  miles; 
the  75  buildings  erected  cost  approximately  $140,000. 
During  the  year  Pearl  River  County  replaced  31  schools 
with  6  consolidated  schools,  to  which  children  are  trans- 
ported in  21  school  wagons;  Harrison  County,  one  of  the 
largest  in  the  State,  had  15  consolidated  schools,  and  only 
30  one-teacher  schools  were  left  at  this  writing. 

In  1 91 5  there  were  192  consolidated  schools  to  which 
7,788  children  were  transported  in  426  school  wagons.     By 


THE   GROWTH  OF   CONSOLmATION  121 

191 7  there  were  290  consolidated  schools  with  14,643  children 
transported  in  725  school  wagons.  This  is  less  than  one- 
half  the  enrolment,  it  being  approximately  33,000  or  an 
average  of  112  to  each  school. 

The  story  in  Missouri  is  of  similar  interest.  In  August, 
191 2,  Mr.  W.  P.  Evans,  then  State  Superintendent  of  Public 
Instruction,  wrote: 

The  story  of  consolidation  in  Missouri  is  a  short  one.  The  laws 
are  ready  and  nothing  is  needed  but  that  they  be  taken  advantage  of; 
yet  practically  no  consolidation  exists.  The  laws  of  Missouri  permit 
three  or  more  common-school  districts  or  a  village  district  with  two 
or  more  common-school  districts  to  unite  into  a  consolidated  district. 
By  a  law  passed  in  191 1,  if  two-thirds  of  the  voters  authorize  it,  trans- 
portation may  be  provided  for  from  the  school  funds.  While  common- 
school  districts  are  not  authorized  to  maintain  high  schools,  such  con- 
solidated districts  may  maintain  high  schools  as  well  as  elementary 
schools.  Comparatively  little  has  been  done  toward  consolidation 
under  these  statutes,  although  the  law  permitting  consolidation  has 
been  on  the  statute-books  for  eleven  years. 

Since  this  was  written  the  State  legislature,  in  19 13, 
revised  the  laws  on  consolidated  schools  and  now  special 
State  aid  to  urge  consolidation  is  given.  By  January  i, 
1914,  29  consolidated  schools  had  been  established.  Two 
years  later  Missouri  reported  122  consolidated  schools  to 
which  7,000  children  were  transported  in  400  wagons. 
Three  of  these  have  first-class  approved  high-school  de- 
partments, 10  have  second-class  high  schools,  50  have  third- 
class.    State  aid  brings  results. 

Activity  in  North  Dakota. — North  Dakota  reported  333 
consolidated  schools  in  1915,  205  of  which  are  in  towns  and 
128  in  open  country.  This  was  an  increase  of  60  during  the 
past  year.  In  191 7  there  were  in  operation  401,  which  have 
replaced  1,200,  one-teacher  schools.  The  records  of  the 
State  inspector  of  rural  schools  show  that  the  proportion 
of  pupils  enrolled  in  the  eighth  grade  in  the  consolidated 
schools  of  the  State  is  twice  as  great  as  in  the  eighth  grades 


122  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

of  the  other  rural  schools;  also,  that  on  account  of  these 
consolidated  schools,  the  high-school  enrolment  of  country- 
children  has  increased  over  threefold  in  the  past  four  years. 
Consolidation  in  North  Dakota  has  been  stimulated  by  the 
vigorous  educational  campaign  conducted  by  the  State  De- 
partment and  by  special  State  aid  during  the  past  two  years 
In  1 9 14  there  were  271  legally  consolidated  schools  in  th^ 
State,  170  of  which  were  located  in  villages  and  loi  in  the 
open  country.  In  addition  there  were  683  schools,  each 
serving  a  large  territory  with  pupils  living  more  than  two 
and  a  half  miles  from  the  school.  Of  these  683  schools,  263 
transported  pupils  at  public  expense.  Only  53  of  them  were 
commonly  spoken  of  as  consolidated. 

Iowa  Consolidations. — In  191 2  Iowa  had  47  consolidated 
schools  with  approximately  1,600  children  transported. 
This  was  about  one-fifth  of  the  attendance  at  these  schools. 
In  1 9 13  legislation  was  secured  to  assist  the  movement. 
During  the  year  following  55  were  established,  nearly  all 
with  two  to  four  year  high-school  departments.  These 
schools  have  been  established  under  the  provisions  of  an 
act  of  the  legislature  of  1913,  giving  special  State  aid  for 
departments  of  agriculture,  domestic  science,  and  manual 
training  in  consolidated  schools.  Each  school  has  a  site  of 
from  4  to  10  acres  for  agricultural  teaching.  In  order  to 
receive  State  aid  the  consolidated  schools  must  meet  the 
requirements  of  the  State  Department  of  Education  concern- 
ing buildings,  grounds,  course  of  study,  and  qualification  of 
teachers.  All  of  these  buildings  have  been  approved  by 
the  department;  all  have  satisfactory  equipment  for  work 
in  agriculture,  manual  training,  and  domestic  science. 
Several  of  them  have  teachers'  cottages  on  the  grounds. 
The  total  number  of  consolidated  schools  in  the  State  at 
this  writing  is  211. 

The  following  statement,  prepared  by  A.  C.  Fuller,  State 
Inspector  of  Rural  Schools,  gives  suggestive  details  of  later 
date: 


THE  OROWTH  OF   CONSOLIDATION  1 23 

Consolidation  of  rural  schools  in  Iowa  means  the  organization  by 
vote,  town  and  country  voting  separately,  of  a  district  which  shall 
contain  at  least  sixteen  sections  of  land.  If  a  town  is  included  in  the 
district  the  building  must  be  located  there.  Transportation  along  the 
pubhc  highway  is  provided  for  every  child  outside  the  town.  If  a 
school  so  organized  possesses  five  acres  of  ground  for  playground  and 
agricultural  demonstration,  plus  suitable  buildings  and  standard 
teaching  force.  State  aid  is  given. 

State  aid  and  the  steady  promotion  and  publicity  work  of  the  De- 
partment of  Public  Instruction  and  allied  agencies  are  responsible  for 
the  great  interest  and  activity  in  forming  consolidated  districts. 

For  twelve  or  thirteen  years  a  few  communities  maintained  suc- 
cessful consolidated  schools,  new  ones  organizing  near  older  centres. 
In  April,  1913,  there  were  seventeen  schools.  At  that  time  the  law 
authorizing  aid  went  into  effect  and  a  field  force  was  added  to  the 
State  Department.  Since  then  consolidated  schools  have  been  added 
at  the  rate  of  fifty-five  annually,  two  hundred  and  thirty-nine  being 
the  number  at  date. 

The  following  condensed  statement  indicates  the  present  status: 

1.  Number  of  consolidated  districts  prior  to  April,  1913 17 

2.  Total  number  of  consolidated  districts  August  i,  1917 239 

3.  Number  of  consolidated  districts  established  in  open  country     28 

4.  Number  of  consolidated  districts  including  towns  over  one 

thousand  population 4 

5.  Number  of  consolidated  districts  including  towns  between  one 

thousand  and  five  hundred  in  population 27 

6.  Number  of  consolidated  districts  including  villages  less  than 

five  hundred  in  population 180 

7.  Average  total  enrolment  in  the  consolidated  schools 180 

8.  Average  total  enrolment  in  the  high-school  department 35 

(Every  consolidated  school  will  have  a  standard  four-year 

high  school.) 

9.  Percentage  of  pupils  from  rural  districts 57 

10.  Average  size  of  consolidated  district,  in  sections  of  land 26 

11.  Minimum  district  receiving  State  aid,  sections 16 

12.  Maximum  district  at  date,  sections 48 

(Recent  tendency  is  to  form  the  larger  districts.) 

13.  Average  size  of  school  ground  in  acres 5-\- 

(Many  schools  have  eight  and  ten  acres,  and  have  employed 

landscape  architects  to  lay  out  premises.) 

14.  Number   of    consolidated    districts   providing    a   principal's 

home  and  a  teachers'  home 15 

15.  Average  number  of  rooms  in  school  buildings 12 


124  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

(Nearly  all  the  buildings  are  new,  provide  modern  facilities 
for  teaching  agriculture,  manual  training,  and  domestic 
science,  include  a  gymnasium  and  a  room  for  community- 
centre  activities.) 

1 6.  Increased  school  facilities  provided  by  consolidation, 
(a)  Standard  school  work  for  i8o  instead  of  i6o  days. 
(J))  Twelve  years  of  work  instead  of  eight. 

17.  Increased  cost  per  acre,  in  rural  portion,  for  consolidated 

schools 1 2  to  18  cents 

18.  Number  of  one-room  schools  already  closed  through  con- 

solidation  1200 

19.  Number  of  consolidated  schools  disbanding  after  once  trying 

out  the  plan  thoroughly o 

ConsoHdation  in  Iowa  is  a  success.  It  is  regarded  as  the  only 
satisfactory  solution  of  the  rural-school  problem.  These  schools  are 
forming  more  rapidly  than  leaders  and  principals  who  have  the  vision 
and  rural-mindedness  required  to  carry  on  the  work  are  becoming 
available.  Normal  schools,  educational  departments,  and  all  agencies 
concerned  with  the  development  of  rural  life  should  stress  the  prepara- 
tion of  leaders  for  consolidated  schools. 

No  more  potent  activity  exists  than  that  which  affects  the  welfare 
of  our  rural-school  population.  Every  boy  and  girl  should  be  within 
easy  daily  reach  of  a  standard  twelve-year  school. 

"  Graded  Rural "  and  "  Intermediate "  Agricultural 
Schools. — Wisconsin  reported  a  considerable  number  of  new 
consolidated  schools.     The  State  superintendent  says: 

The  interest  in  the  subject  is  continually  increasing,  and  the  senti- 
ment is  growing  more  and  more  favorable. 

One  phase  of  the  consolidation  question  that  is  frequently  over- 
looked is  the  rather  marvellous  growth  of  State  graded  schools.  We 
have  now  in  Wisconsin  almost  600  of  these  institutions,  employing 
1,450  teachers,  scattered  over  the  State.  About  one-half  of  them  are 
doing  some  work  beyond  the  eighth  grade.  Each  of  these  schools 
really  becomes  an  educational  centre  which  in  many  cases  is  equiva- 
lent to  a  consolidation  centre.  Another  phase  of  the  consolidation 
work  is  quite  prominent  in  the  State,  namely,  the  estabhshment  of 
joint  and  union  high  schools.  This  is  essentially  a  phase  of  consoli- 
dation for  high-school  purposes.  In  these  places  the  elementary  edu- 
cation is  taken  care  of  in  the  local  one-room  district  schools,  while  the 
secondary  education  is  taken  care  of  by  the  large  high-school  district. 


THE   GROWTH  OF   CONSOLHiATION  1 25 

New  York  State  reported  that  about  100  consolidated 
schools  have  been  established  during  the  past  year.  In  one 
instance  1 1  districts  have  been  consolidated  at  West  Chazy, 
Clinton  County,  in  the  Champlain  Valley;  and  a  philan- 
thropic citizen  of  that  vicinity  is  erecting  an  endowed 
building  which  will  be  one  of  the  most  completely  equipped 
school  buildings  in  the  State. 

Deputy  Commissioner  of  Education  Thomas  E.  Fine- 
gan  points  out  that  as  a  result  of  this  movement  in  the 
consolidation  of  one-room  schools  several  schools  have  been 
organized  which  will  do  the  usual  work  of  the  eight  grades 
in  the  elementary  course  and  two  years  of  high-school  work. 
He  says: 

These  schools  are  generally  known  as  intermediate  agricultural 
schools.  The  courses  of  study  are  along  the  lines  of  agriculture  for 
boys  and  domestic  science  and  home-making  for  girls.  Teachers  of 
agriculture  have  been  employed  in  these  schools  on  the  understanding 
that  they  do  continuation  work  during  the  summer  vacation.  The 
whole  general  trend  in  the  courses  for  elementary  schools  is  to  include 
some  work  along  agricultural  lines  so  that  the  work  of  the  school  is 
brought  into  closer  relation  and  has  a  direct  bearing  on  the  life  on 
the  farm.     Special  effort  has  been  made  to  organize  new  schools. 

Other  States. — The  number  of  consolidated  schools  in 
a  few  other  States  as  reported  by  the  State  departments  of 
education  is  as  follows:  California  27,  Colorado  21,  Dela- 
ware I,  Kansas  94,  Nebraska  26,  Nevada  3,  South  Dakota 
24,  West  Virginia  24,  with  transportation  and  many  with- 
out. In  191 5-16,  250  one-room  schools  were  abandoned 
and  consolidated  into  small  graded  schools.  In  Wayne 
County  60  one-teacher  schools  have  been  replaced  by  26 
graded  schools,  with  from  two  to  four  teachers. 

VII.     Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools,  191 7 

On  February  13,  191 7,  a  request  was  sent  to  each  State 
superintendent,  asking  the  number  of  consolidated  schools 
in  the  State  at  that  time  and  the  number  that  had  been 


126  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

established  during  the  past  three  years.  Answers  were 
received  from  all  except  Arizona.  The  following  is  digested 
from  the  answers  received  from  30.  The  17  not  included 
reported  that  no  data  were  available  or  their  answers  were 
too  indefinite  to  be  used.  These  17  included  Connecticut, 
Idaho,  Maryland,  Massachusetts,  Montana,  New  Jersey, 
New  Mexico,  New  York,  Oregon,  Pennsylvania,  Texas, 
Utah,  Vermont,  Virginia,  Wisconsin,  Wyoming.  Of  course, 
the  war  slowed  up  or  stopped  building  operations. 

Of  the  30  mentioned  below,  26  report  5,132  consoli- 
dated schools.  The  number  in  Maine,  Florida,  North  Caro- 
lina, and  West  Virginia  is  not  given.  These  latter  three, 
together  with  Massachusetts,  New  York,  Texas,  Utah, 
Virginia,  and  Wisconsin,  have  many  consolidated  or 
schools  similar  to  consolidated  schools.  A  conservative 
estimate  of  the  total  number  in  the  United  States,  includ- 
ing "consolidated,"  "centralized,"  and  "union"  schools,  is 

7,500- 

Alabama. — Total,  69  consolidated  schools,  61  of  which 
were  established  during  the  past  school  year;  166  schools 
were  abandoned  in  making  these  consolidations;  48  of  the 
consolidations  were  efifected  by  bringing  together  two 
schools,  16  by  three  schools,  3  by  four  schools,  and  2  by 
five  or  more  schools. 

Arkansas. — Total,  125,  of  which  86  were  established 
during  the  past  three  years. 

California. — Total,  27. 

Colorado. — Total,  21. 

Delaware. — Total,  i. 

Florida. — The  State  Department  has  no  record  of  the 
total  number;  approximately  $50,000  was  paid  in  191 5-1 6 
for  transportation  to  consolidated  schools. 

Georgia. — In  191 5-16  there  were  159  consolidated  schools 
to  which  3,123  pupils  were  transported  at  public  expense. 
"The  number  of  consolidated  schools  is  increasing  approxi- 
mately 25  per  cent  each  year." 


THE  GROWTH  OF  CONSOLn)ATION  1 27 

Illinois. — The  State  Department  reports  10  consoli- 
dated schools,  three  of  which  were  established  during  the 
past  three  years  by  abolishing  11  district  schools. 

Indiana. — Total,  706,  41  of  which  were  established  in 
the  past  two  years. 

Iowa. — Total,  214,  181  of  which  were  established  in  the 
past  three  years.  The  number  of  schools  abandoned  for 
consolidated  schools  is  1,284;  the  average  area  for  consoli- 
dated districts  is  24  square  miles. 

Kansas. — Of  the  94  consolidated  schools  in  the  State,  1 2 
have  been  estabHshed  during  the  past  three  years;  236  dis- 
tricts were  consolidated  to  form  these  94. 

Kentucky. — Total,  41,  36  of  which  were  established  dur- 
ing the  past  three  years.  The  7,6  replaced  120  one-teacher 
schools.  Only  14  of  the  consolidated  schools  furnish  free 
transportation. 

Louisiana. — The  State  Department  reports  818  consoli- 
dated schools,  of  which  580  were  established  during  the 
past  three  years.  Included  in  this  total  number,  however, 
are  "all  rural  schools  having  two  or  more  teachers,  that  is, 
all  such  schools  located  in  communities  of  2,500  population 
or  less." 

Maine. — No  statistics  are  available  relative  to  the  total 
number;  the  number  of  one-room  rural  schools  has  de- 
creased in  the  past  three  years  from  2,459  to  2,358. 

Michigan. — Total,  8. 

Minnesota. — In  19 16  there  were  220  consolidated  schools, 
of  which  140  were  established  in  the  past  three  years.  The 
consolidated  schools  replaced  454  schools  of  the  old  type. 

Mississippi. — Nearly  all  the  consolidation  has  taken 
place  in  the  last  five  years.  In  1916  consolidated  schools 
were  found  in  64  counties.  There  were  290  schools  with 
977  teachers,  725  wagons,  and  14,643  pupils  transported. 
The  enrolment  in  the  schools  was  33,037. 

Missouri. — Total,  122,  all  consolidated  within  the  past 
three  years. 


128  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Nebraska. — Total,  28. 

Nevada. — Three  consolidated  schools  effected  during 
the  past  three  years  take  the  place  of  six  schools  of  the  old 
type. 

North  Carolina. — In  the  year  ending  July,  191 6,  84  dis- 
tricts were  consolidated  into  36  new  districts.  Since  19 13 
the  number  of  one- teacher  schools  has  decreased  516,  or 
14  per  cent. 

North  Dakota. — Total,  401,  211  having  been  established 
in  the  past  three  years.  The  401  replace  approximately 
i,2cx)  schools  of  the  old  type. 

Ohio. — Ohio  in  19 14  had  358  consolidated  schools;  in 
1915,  468;  in  1916,  539. 

Oklahoma, — Total,  103,  of  which  19  were  established  dur- 
ing the  past  two  years;  77  of  these  consolidated  districts  re- 
place 215  old  districts. 

Rhode  Island. — In  the  State  there  is  one  consolidated 
school  established  by  the  union  of  four  ungraded  schools; 
23  other  ungraded  schools  have  been  closed  and  the  pupils 
transported  to  graded  schools  already  established. 

South  Carolina. — Four  hundred  "rural  graded  schools" 
were  in  operation  in  1914-15,  562  in  1915-16,  and  700  in 
1916-17.  These  are  the  schools  receiving  special  State  aid 
under  the  act  of  the  State  legislature  of  191 2  "to  encourage 
consoKdated  and  graded  schools  in  country  districts." 

South  Dakota. — Total,  24,  of  which  20  were  effected  dur- 
ing the  past  year. 

Tennessee. — Total,  404,  of  which  261  were  established 
during  the  past  three  years. 

Washington. — June  30,  1916,  there  were  161,  39  of  which 
were  established  during  the  past  three  years. 

West  Virginia. — There  are  24  consolidated  schools  which 
provide  transportation,  and  a  considerable  number  of  others 
without  transportation.  In  191 5-16,  250  one-room  schools 
were  abandoned  and  consolidated  into  small  graded  schools. 
In  Wayne  County  in  six  years  60  one-room  schools  have 


THE  GROWTH  OP  CONSOLIDATION  1 29 

been  consolidated  into  26  graded  schools  of  from  two  to 
four  rooms. 

Thus  we  see  that  this  movement  is  rapidly  spreading 
over  the  entire  country.  Good  roads,  the  increased  use  of 
automobiles,  the  county  unit  for  school  administration, 
State  aid,  and  teachers  better  educated  for  rural-life  leader- 
ship will  greatly  accelerate  the  movement. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  Study  the  growth  of  consolidation  in  some  one  county  if  possible 

and  note  particulady  the  factors  that  promote  and  retard  the 
movement. 

2.  What  is  the  record  as  to  the  giving  up  of  consolidation  after  it  has 

been  established  in  this  country? 

3.  What  States  have  most  consolidated  schools  of  the  highest  type? 

4.  What  type  of  region  had  best  not  attempt  consolidation? 

5.  Are  there  any  typical  regions  in  the  United  States  where  there  are 

not  now  successful  consolidated  schools — thus,  mountainous,  cold, 
blizzardy,  bad-roads,  long-haul,  backward-population,  poor,  and 
other  regions? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The  bibliography  here  is  mainly  in  the  form  of  State,  national,  and 
other  reports.  A  few  writers  have  given  brief  histories  of  consolida- 
tion but  the  essential  facts  will  be  found  in  the  writer's  "Consolida- 
tion of  Schools  and  Transportation  of  Pupils  at  Public  Expense." 
The  reports  of  the  United  States  Bureau  of  Education  should  be 
watched  for  resumes  of  the  spread  and  development  of  consolidation. 
Just  now  it  is  spreading  more  than  developing.  Later  will  come  a 
period  of  improvement  in  which  the  best  schools  that  have  started  well 
and  grown  by  experimentation  and  study  will  become  the  standard  for 
all  to  attain. 


CHAPTER  VII 
A  VISIT  TO  A   CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  "Get  yourself  ready"  for  a  delightful  visit  with  Mrs.  Cook,  of  the 

United  States  Bureau  of  Education,  to  a  progressive  consolidated 
school  in  the  West  and  secure  also  a  bird's-eye  view  and  the 
concrete  detail  necessary  for  a  close  study  of  many  aspects  of  the 
consolidated  school  in  succeeding  chapters. 

2.  If  possible,  visit  a  consolidated  school  within  your  reach. 

I.    Location  and  History 

After  the  preceding  discussions  of  the  practical  problem 
and  the  social  and  administrative  setting  of  the  consolidated 
rural  school,  the  reader  will  be  interested  to  visit  with  us 
such  a  school. 

The  "crossroads"  village  of  La  Porte,  Colorado,  con- 
tains a  blacksmith-shop,  post-office,  and  store  combined, 
and  a  few  houses,  and  is  located  about  three  miles  north  and 
west  of  the  city  of  Fort  Collins,  the  seat  of  the  Colorado 
State  College  of  Agriculture.  The  village  does  not  present 
a  dignified  appearance  from  an  architectural  standpoint, 
although  it  has  a  distinguished  history,  for  at  one  time  it 
aspired  to  be  the  capital  of  the  State,  an  honor  which  it 
lost  by  but  one  vote  to  the  neighboring  city  of  Golden;  and 
it  was  for  some  years  the  county-seat  of  Larimer  County. 
While  the  village  itself,  judging  from  its  present  appear- 
ance, has  degenerated  somewhat  from  those  illustrious  days, 
the  surrounding  country  has  not  suffered  a  similar  experi- 
ence. It  is  one  of  the  most  productive  sections  of  northern 
Colorado.  Orchards  line  the  roadways  and  apple-laden 
hay-racks  pass  the  visitor  on  the  way;  small  fruits,  sugar- 
beets,  alfalfa,  and  grain  are  raised  in  abundance,  and  stock 

130 


A  VISIT  TO  A  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL  I31 

and  dairy  products  help  to  make  a  thrifty  and  prosperous 
community. 

Near  the  village  trading  centre  in  the  midst  of  farms  and 
orchards  located  in  the  open  country  is  the  Cache  La  Poudre 
Consolidated  School.  Less  than  four  years  ago  five  one- 
teacher  schools  and  one  three- teacher  school  in  four  differ- 
ent districts  served  the  educational  needs  of  the  farm  peo- 
ple living  in  the  vicinity  of  the  village  of  La  Porte.  About 
that  time  the  State  College  gf  Agriculture  near  by  was 
moved  by  the  spirit  of  better  country  life  and  appointed  a 
*' rural-school  visitor '*  as  a  member  of  its  faculty.  The 
visitor  in  December,  191 2,  on  the  invitation  of  the  principal 
of  the  school  at  La  Porte,  spent  several  days  visiting  and 
interviewing  the  people  in  the  homes  of  the  neighborhood 
and  collecting  statistical  data  on  attendance  and  financial 
conditions  and  possibilities,  from  the  schools  and  from  the 
county  superintendent's  office.  According  to  the  investi- 
gator, the  buildings  were  in  bad  condition,  four  of  them  un- 
fit for  use;  the  majority  of  the  teachers  were  such  as  you 
usually  find  in  country  schools  of  this  kind;  the  attendance 
was  poor  and  the  schools  in  general  woefully  inefficient. 

A  Survey  and  Publicity. — The  result  of  this  survey  of 
the  districts  seemed  to  the  majority  of  the  leaders  in  the 
community  to  justify  immediate  consolidation.  The  weeks 
following  the  survey  were  devoted  to  a  campaign  of  educa- 
tion for  the  community  during  which  meetings  were  held 
in  all  of  the  districts  involved  and  the  matter  of  school  con- 
solidation enthusiastically  agitated.  In  April,  1913,  an 
election  was  held  to  decide  the  question  and  the  majority 
voted  in  favor  of  the  new  plan.  In  June  bonds  were  voted 
for  a  $26,000  building,  the  corner-stone  of  which  was  laid 
July  2,  1 9 13.  In  the  following  September  the  new  building 
was  opened  to  the  children  of  the  combined  territory  of 
the  four  districts  immediately  surrounding  it  and  was  named 
from  a  near-by  river,  the  Cache  La  Poudre.  The  consoli- 
dated district  is  approximately  25  square  miles  in  area, 


132  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

contains  170  families  and  325  census  children.  The  school 
building,  while  not  in  the  geographical  centre,  is  strategically 
located  with  reference  to  the  population.  The  visit  here 
described  was  made  when  the  school  was  in  its  third  year. 

II.    The  School  Plant  and  Transportation 

Rarely  does  one  find  a  more  beautiful  natural  site  for  a 
school  building  than  that  selected  by  the  trustees  in  charge. 
Majestic  old  cottonwoods  are  lined  in  rows  at  each  side  and 
at  the  back  of  the  building  and  massed  at  one  side  in  the 
rear  near  the  playground.  In  the  background,  less  than 
fifty  miles  to  the  west — seeming,  in  the  clear  atmosphere 
of  the  November  day,  not  more  than  ten — is  the  main 
range  of  the  Rocky  Mountains,  capped  in  the  distance 
by  three  of  its  highest  peaks.  From  the  athletic  field,  from 
the  front  entrance,  from  the  west  and  south  windows  there 
is,  at  all  times,  for  the  delight  of  the  nature-lover — and  all 
country  dwellers,  especially  children,  should  be  nature- 
lovers — a  magnificent  view  of  more  than  one  hundred  miles 
of  perpetually  snow-covered  mountains. 

As  the  visitor  enters  the  building  from  the  road  he  may 
notice  among  the  tall  trees  at  the  left  swings  and  other  play 
equipment.  Still  at  the  left  and  toward  the  rear  of  the 
building  is  the  manual-training  shop.  At  the  right  are  more 
trees,  a  larger  playground,  the  athletic  fields,  and  the  super- 
intendent's cottage.  Surrounding  the  school  grounds  are 
farms  and  orchards — apples  and  small  fruits  being  important 
products  of  this  section. 

The  building  itself  is  a  substantial  brick  structure  of 
two  stories  with  a  commodious  basement.  The  latter  is 
almost  entirely  above  ground,  and  the  schoolrooms  proper 
must,  therefore,  be  reached  by  a  number  of  stone  steps 
leading  directly  to  the  wide  hallway.  In  the  centre  of  the 
hallway  a  staircase  leads  to  the  upper  floor.  On  either  side 
are  two  classrooms  for  the  elementary  grades.     Ascending 


A  VISIT  TO  A  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL  I33 

the  stairway  one  passes  on  the  landing  and  at  the  rear  of 
the  building  a  small  sunny  sewing-room  whose  sashed  win- 
dows shut  it  from  view  from  the  stairway  and  at  the  same 
time  proclaim  its  purpose  to  the  visitor.  Continuing  to  the 
second  floor  there  are  two  small  rooms  at  the  front.  One 
serves  as  library  and  superintendent's  office  and  one  as  the 
teachers'  retiring  and  rest  room.  The  high-school  assembly- 
room  occupies  one  entire  side  of  the  upper  floor  with  the  door 
entering  it  near  the  head  of  the  staircase  on  the  left.  On 
the  right  are  the  laboratory  and  a  large  classroom. 

The  assembly-room  is  lighted  from  the  south  and  west. 
The  side  nearest  the  hall  has  a  movable  wooden  partition. 
This  can  be  so  raised  as  to  form,  with  the  hallway,  an  audi- 
torium of  reasonable  size.  The  school  owns  a  supply  of 
folding-chairs,  and  comfortable  seating  arrangements  can 
thus  be  provided  for  the  various  recreational  activities  of 
which  the  school  is  the  centre. 

The  rest-room  is  furnished  with  a  couch,  rug,  table,  and 
chairs,  and  is  comfortable  and  inviting.  The  library  is  not 
large  at  present  but  the  books  are  well  selected  and  will 
form  a  nucleus  for  a  reference  and  circulating  library  of 
more  pretentious  size  when  circumstances  permit.  The 
laboratory  is  supplied  simply  with  the  usual  apparatus  for 
chemistry  and  physics,  a  separator,  and  an  eight-hole  Bab- 
cock  milk-tester. 

The  basement  contains  two  large  rooms,  one  at  each  side 
of  the  front  entrance.  These  serve  as  lunchrooms  and 
stormy-day  playrooms.  One  side  is  assigned  to  the  boys 
and  the  other  to  the  girls.  Adjoining  these  rooms  are  the 
toilets,  which  are  of  modern  sanitary  type  and  are  kept 
clean  and  wholesome.  The  floors  in  the  basement  are  of 
cement,  and  the  rooms  here  are  all  light,  dry,  and  "airy." 
At  the  rear  of  the  building  and  near  the  foot  of  the  inside 
stairway  is  the  kitchen,  equipped  with  individual  cooking- 
tables  and  closets;  cupboards  for  supplies,  sink,  water,  oil- 
stoves,  and  other  necessaries. 


134  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

The  outside  manual- training  shop,  previously  mentioned, 
is  a  commodious  frame  building  remodelled  from  one  of  the 
old  schoolhouses.  The  benches  are  of  simple  home-made 
variety  and  the  equipment  is  adequate  but  not  elaborate. 
This  shop  is  made  to  approximate  as  nearly  as  possible  the 
better  type  of  workshop  of  the  ordinary  farm.  It  is  heated 
with  a  stove  and  contains  two  rooms. 

The  superintendent's  home  is  also  a  remodelled  build- 
ing, being  one  of  the  best  of  the  old  abandoned  frame  school- 
houses.  It  has  large,  pleasant  rooms,  a  screened  porch  along 
the  front  and  rear,  and  a  bathroom.  This  ^'teacherage"  is 
part  of  the  school  property,  built  especially  as  the  home  of 
the  superintendent.  No  rent  is  charged,  its  use  being  al- 
lowed by  the  board  in  addition  to  the  regular  salary  paid. 

The  school  board  has  also  a  three-year  lease  on  a  small 
orchard,  house,  and  barn  which  adjoins  the  school  grounds. 
This  is  subleased  to  the  eighth-grade  teacher,  who  is  a  mar- 
ried man  and  who  occupies  the  cottage  and  cultivates  the 
ground.  During  the  year  preceding  the  time  of  visiting  the 
school  this  teacher  sold  almost  enough  from  the  land  to  pay 
the  rent  in  addition  to  supplying  his  own  table.  In  addition 
to  these  two  residences  controlled  by  the  school  board,  four 
rooms  in  the  basement  of  the  main  building  were  finished 
and  set  apart  for  the  janitor^s  residence.  So  the  district 
really  houses  three  of  its  employees  with  their  families. 
The  janitor  receives  $45  per  month,  house  room,  light, 
water,  and  fuel.  He  lives  in  the  building  throughout  the 
year  and  is  responsible  to  the  board  for  its  proper  care  at 
all  timps.  According  to  the  rules  of  the  board  published  in 
pamphlet  form  for  general  distribution,  the  "janitor  shall 
be  the  assistant  executive  officer  of  the  superintendent  to 
help  carry  out  all  the  rules  and  regulations  of  the  board 
and  superintendent  so  far  as  they  may  apply  to  the  build- 
ings, grounds,  and  discipline.  When  school  is  not  in  ses- 
sion he  shall  be  in  complete  control  of  the  building,  subject 
only  to  the  orders  of  the  school  board." 


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The  Colorado  school  visited  by  Mrs.  Cook 
Two-story  building  of  old-style  architecture,  but  good  school  work  within  and  without 


A  movable  partition  for  auditorium  use,  Cache  La  Poudre  school 


A  VISIT  TO  A  CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL  I35 

The  classrooms  are  all  large  and  well  lighted.  There 
are  cement  walks,  oiled  floors,  and  adjustable  desks  of  a 
modern  and  approved  type.  There  are  sanitary  drinking- 
fountains  on  both  floors.  The  water  is  piped  from  the  Fort 
Collins  city  system  and  is  pure,  soft,  mountain  water.  The 
walls  are  finished  in  hard  plaster  and  in  each  room  is  hung 
at  least  one  good  picture,  several  of  which  are  copies  of 
well-known  masterpieces  of  art.  The  woodwork  is  in  natural 
finish;  the  windows  are  fitted  with  shades,  and  in  general 
the  interior  has  the  appearance  of  simplicity,  appropriate- 
ness, and  comfort. 

The  play  and  athletic  grounds  are  marvels  of  good  sense 
in  selection.  The  plant,  exclusive  of  the  leased  orchard, 
covers  four  and  one-half  acres,  including  a  half-acre  orchard 
and  garden  used  by  the  superintendent  and  the  janitor. 
The  grounds  are  made  not  alone  beautiful  but  cool  and  in- 
viting by  the  shade  of  majestic  trees,  and  the  play  apparatus, 
all  of  which  is  home-made,  is  so  placed  as  to  utilize  this  ad- 
vantage. There  are  two  swings,  two  giant  strides,  and  eight 
teeters,  all  placed  about  the  building  close  to  the  trees  and 
out  of  range  of  the  ball-fields.  The  accompanying  pictures 
give  some  idea  of  the  distribution.  On  the  athletic  field  are 
two  basket-ball  fields,  football  gridiron,  and  baseball  dia- 
mond. The  principal  says  they  are  all  in  constant  use,  in- 
cluding the  apparatus  for  play. 

Transportation. — Transportation  being  the  rock  on 
which  so  many  thriving  consolidation  schemes  have  split,  it 
is  a  real  pleasure  to  find  that  there  are  no  complaints  and 
no  dissatisfied  murmurs  in  regard  to  this  phase  of  the  school 
management.  The  district  owns  seven  substantial  covered 
wagons,  each  of  which  cost  approximately  $200.  The  teams 
are  owned  by  the  drivers  and  are  valued  at  about  $400  each. 
The  district,  as  related  above,  covers  twenty-five  square 
miles,  and  the  wagons  transport  the  children  distances  vary- 
ing from  three  to  five  miles.  The  number  of  children  carried 
in  each  wagon  varies  from  seventeen  to  twenty-four  or 


136  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

more,  the  aim  being  to  keep  the  number  below  twenty-four 
if  possible.  The  total  number  transported  averages  160 
pupils  daily.  The  school  board  awards  a  contract  to  the 
lowest  bidder,  providing  he  is  a  satisfactory  person,  but  re- 
serves the  right  to  reject  any  or  all  bids.  The  qualifications 
required  are  very  exacting,  only  mature,  responsible  men 
being  eligible,  and  a  $500  bond  required.  By  the  terms  of 
the  contract  the  driver  is  to  take  entire  charge  of  the  chil- 
dren on  his  route,  to  be  accountable  for  their  welfare,  to 
see  that  they  conduct  themselves  in  a  proper  manner, 
and  to  report  all  misconduct  on  the  part  of  the  chil- 
dren to  the  principal.  The  contract  also  stipulates  that  no 
profane  language  shall  be  used  either  by  driver  or  the  chil- 
dren and  that  the  driver  maintain  a  time  schedule  and 
provide  proper  housing  and  care  for  the  wagon.  In  ad- 
dition to  these  stipulated  regulations  the  rules  of  the  school 
before  referred  to  provide  that  there  shall  be  two  time- 
tables furnished  to  patrons  on  a  "route-sheet,'' one  for  good 
roads  and  one  for  bad  roads;  that  the  driver  must  not  vary 
from  the  time-table  once  established  and  must  not  pass  the 
point  of  stopping  if  the  pupils  are  not  ready  until  five  min- 
utes after  the  time  scheduled,  unless  he  be  notified  that  the 
pupils  will  not  attend  school  that  day. 

Pupils  are  required  to  remain  seated  while  the  wagon  is 
in  motion;  to  be  at  the  proper  pl'ace  on  time;  to  refrain  from 
boisterous  or  profane  language.  The  use  of  tobacco  by 
pupils  or  driver  is  forbidden  while  on  the  wagons.  Even 
parents  may  not  censure  drivers  on  penalty  of  having  their 
children  excluded  from  the  privilege  of  the  wagons.  All 
necessary  complaints  must  be  made  to  the  superintendent. 

The  routes  are  so  planned  that  no  child  rides  in  a  round- 
about way.  When  he  enters  the  wagon  he  is  headed  di- 
rectly for  the  schoolhouse.  In  the  morning  the  drivers  go 
to  the  end  of  the  route  and  pick  up  children  on  the  return. 
After  school  the  children  are  taken  directly  home.  The  sala- 
ries of  drivers  and  distances  travelled  by  each  are  as  follows: 


A  VISIT  TO  A  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL 


-^d,! 


SALARY 


DISTANCE 


No.  I. 

2. 

3 
4. 
5- 
6. 

7- 


Average . 


$40.00 
37.50 
49.00 
39.80 
34.00 
47.50 
49  50 


$42.47 


7,yi  miles 

5 
4 
3 
3 
4 


3^  miles 


III.    The  Work  of  the  School 

During  the  last  two  years  under  the  old  system,  with 
four  districts  and  six  schools,  the  territory  now  comprised 
in  the  consolidated  district  had  a  school  census,  enrolment, 
and  attendance  as  follows: 


Year 

1912 

230 

238 

155 

65 

0 

1913 

269 

228 

138 

60 

0 

Census 

Enrolment • 

Average  daily  attendance 

Percentage  of  attendance  to  enrolment 

Enrolled  in  high  school  in  district 

For    the   year  19 16,  in  the  consolidated  school,  corre- 
sponding figures  are  as  follows: 


1916 


325 


198 


90 


45 


Here  we  see  a  high-school  enrolment  raised  from  nothing 
to  forty- five  pupils,  and  an  attendance  increased  30  per  cent. 

For  the  month  of  December,  191 6,  the  principal  reports 
no  tardiness  in  the  elementary  school  and  but  six  cases  in 
the  high  school.  There  are  relatively  few  foreigners  in  the 
district  and  Americans  predominate  in  the  school  enrol- 


138  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

ment.     There  are,  however,  about  22  per  cent  of  Mexican 
and  12  per  cent  of  German  parentage. 

The  increase  in  attendance  and  percentage  of  attendance 
to  enrolment  since  consolidation  has  continued  very  marked. 
Before  the  consolidation  was  effected  there  was  no  high 
school  nearer  than  that  located  at  Fort  Collins,  a  city  of 
about  10,000  inhabitants,  at  a  distance  of  more  than  six 
miles  from  some  of  the  homes.  At  the  time  of  the  visit 
there  were  45  pupils  enrolled  in  high  school  and  175  in  the 
grades.  In  June,  191 5,  twelve  pupils  finished  the  eighth 
grade,  ten  of  whom  entered  high  school  the  following  au- 
tumn. In  June,  1916,  ten  completed  the  eighth  grade,  all 
of  whom  entered  high  school  in  the  fall  of  191 6.  Others 
from  outside  the  class  entered  high  school,  giving  the  en- 
tering class  an  enrolment  of  18.  The  school's  ability  to 
hold  children  through  the  grades  is  represented  roughly  by 
the  following  data  showing  enrolment  for  all  grades  for  the 
four  months  preceding  January,  191 7.  Little  decrease  in 
grade  enrolment  as  we  go  upward  through  the  grades  is 
present. 

Year i       2      3      4      5      6      7      8      I    II    HI    IV 

Enrolment 29     25     25     30    37     19     16     12     18    11      19        8 

Teachers. — Including  the  superintendent,  who  teaches 
mathematics  and  agriculture,  nine  teachers  are  employed. 
Of  these,  three  are  men  and  six  are  women.  Three  women 
and  one  man  devote  their  entire  time  to  the  elementary 
grades,  two  grades  being  assigned  to  each;  three  devote 
their  entire  time  to  the  high  school,  and  two  special  teachers 
divide  their  time  between  the  high  school  and  the  elemen- 
tary grades.  All  of  the  teachers  but  one  are  graduates  of 
normal  school  or  college,  five  having  A.B.  or  B.S.  degrees. 
Four  receive  $75  per  month,  one  $80,  and  three  $85  per 
month.  The  seventh  and  eighth  grade  teacher  is  paid  for 
twelve  months  in  the  year,  the  others  for  nine  months.  The 
superintendent  was  serving  his  second  year  of  a  three-year 


A  VISIT  TO  A  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL  139 

contract  by  the  terms  of  which  he  was  to  receive  $1,300 
the  first  year  and  $100  per  year  increase  for  each  of  the  re- 
maining two  years.  He  was  then  getting  $1,400  and  the 
use  of  a  house  and  orchard.  Two  of  the  men  teachers,  as 
related  above,  have  homes  on  the  school  grounds.  One  un- 
married man  and  three  women  board  in  the  district.  The 
other  three  are  permanent  residents  in  the  district  and  live 
in  the  homes  of  their  families.  The  cost  of  board  and  room 
is  about  $22.50  per  month. 

Organization. — With  respect  to  the  organization  of  the 
work  of  the  school  we  have  stated  that  the  school  includes 
the  eight  regular  elementary  grades  and. four  years  of  high 
school.  Manual  training,  cooking,  and  sewing  begin  in  the 
sixth  grade  and  continue  through  the  remainder  of  the  ele- 
mentary course  and  high  school.  Agriculture  begins  in  the 
seventh  grade  and  continues  throughout  the  remaining  six 
years  of  the  course.  The  sixth-grade  girls  have  one  recita- 
tion per  week  of  ninety  minutes'  duration  in  domestic 
science,  while  the  boys  devote  the  same  period  to  manual 
training.  The  pupils  of  the  seventh  and  eighth  grades  and 
high  school  devote  two  periods  of  one  and  one-half  hours 
each  per  week  to  these  subjects.  In  addition  to  manual 
training  and  household  economics,  agriculture  has  a  promi- 
nent place  in  the  curriculum.  In  the  seventh  and  eighth 
grades  a  course  in  elementary  agriculture  is  given;  in  the 
ninth  grade  physical  and  commercial  geography  and  soils; 
in  the  tenth  grade  animal  life  and  agricultural  botany;  in 
the  eleventh  grade  advanced  agriculture  and  stock-judging; 
in  the  twelfth  grade  rural  economics.  Special  attention  is 
given  to  milk-testing  for  neighboring  farmers  and  to  testing 
cream  and  skimmed  milk. 

Drawing  and  music  are  taught  throughout  the  grades 
and  high  school.  One  half-hour  period  per  week  in  the 
grades  and  one  forty-five-minute  period  per  week  in  high 
school  are  devoted  to  each  of  these  subjects.  There  are 
four  sections  in  the  elementary  school,  two  grades  in  each, 


I40  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

and  one  in  high  school  for  this  purpose.  The  teacher  in 
charge  of  manual  training  also  teaches  history  and  algebra 
in  the  high  school.  Another  special  teacher  has  charge  of 
all  the  music,  drawing,  cooking,  and  sewing  in  the  grades 
and  high  school.  This  arrangement  allows  the  inclusion  in 
the  curriculum  of  a  variety  of  special  subjects  at  a  mini- 
mum cost.  The  high  school  is  one  of  the  70  high  schools 
(of  the  total  of  247  in  the  State)  which  are  on  the  accredit- 
ed list  of  the  State  University. 

Six-Six  Plan. — After  191 7  the  superintendent  expects  to 
adopt  the  six-six  plan  of  organization.  At  the  time  of  our 
visit  the  following  subjects  were  offered  in  the  high  school. 
Electives  are  placed  in  the  second  column.  It  should  be 
noted  that  history,  four  years  of  English,  and  drawing  and 
music  were  then  all  required  subjects: 


REQUIRED 

ELECTIVE 

General  history. 

Rhetoricals. 

American  history. 

Latin. 

Civics. 

German. 

Algebra. 

Chemistry. 

Geometry. 

Physical  geography. 

Rhetoric. 

Commercial  geography, 

English  composition. 

Agriculture. 

English  literature. 

Animal  husbandry. 

American  literature. 

Farm  arithmetic. 

Physics. 

Farm  management. 

Zoology. 

Rural  economics. 

Agricultural  botany. 

Cooking. 

Sewing. 

Manual  training. 

Drawing. 

Music. 

As  an  illustration  of  the  organization  for  the  instruction 
in  manual  training,  sewing,  cooking,  music,  and  drawing,  a 
portion  of  the  daily  schedule  of  the  seventh  and  eighth 
grades  is  appended.  The  full  programme  for  the  sixth  grade 
is  given  as  an  illustration  of  the  division  of  time  possible  in 


A  VISIT  TO   A  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL 


141 


a  consolidated  school  as  compared  with  that  of  a  one- 
teacher  school  in  which  there  are  from  25  to  40  recitations 
daily: 


Sixth  Grade  Programme 


A.  M. 

9.00-  9 

9.15-  9 
9.40-10 

lO.IO-IO 

10.30-10 
I0.45-II 
II.I5-II 

1 1. 40-1  2 
P.  M. 
I.OO-   I 
1.20- 
1.50- 
2.00- 
2.10- 
2.30- 

2.45- 
3.10- 
3.20- 
3.35- 


Music    and    drawing    on 
Wednesdays  and  Fridays 


1 5 — Music — Opening  exercises 

40 — Recite  reading 

10 — Study  geography 

30 — Recite  geography 

45 — Recess 

15 — Study  arithmetic 

40 — Recite  arithmetic 

00 — Study  physiology.     (History  first  half  year) 

Noon 
20 — Penmanship 
50 — Study  language 
00 — Grammar  drill 
10 — Physical  exercises 
30 — Recite  language 
45 — Recess 
10 — Study  spelling 
20 — Recite  spelling 
35 — Recite  physiology. 


(History  first  half  year) 


Seventh  and  Eighth  Grade  Programme 

30,  Mon.,  Tues.,  Wed.,  and  Fri. — Reading  and  arithmetic 

Thurs. — Music,  drawing 
00,  Fri. — Sewing  and  manual  training 
45,  Mon.,  Tues.,  Wed.,  and  Thurs.— Civics  and  history 
00,  Mon  and  Wed. — Physical  exercises 

Tues.,  Wed.,  and  Thurs. — Physiology 

30,  Mon.,  Wed.,  Thurs.,  and  Fri. — Reading,  language,  writ- 
ing 
Tues. — Sewing  and  manual  training 


Course  of  Study. — The  course  of  study  followed  differs 
from  the  conventional  course  in  the  emphasis  placed  on 
manual  training,  agriculture,  cooking,  and  sewing,  and  the 
opportunity  which  the  inclusion  of  these  subjects  gives  to 


A.  M. 

9.00-10. 

10.50-12. 
10. 50-1 1. 
11.45-12. 

p.  M. 
I.OO-    2. 


142  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

correlate  the  traditional  topics  with  matters  concerned  with 
home  and  farm  work.  The  course  offered  is  highly  voca- 
tional from  the  point  of  view  of  the  boys  and  girls  who  are 
to  make  farming  and  farm  home-making  a  life-work.  In  or- 
der that  the  work  given  at  school  may  reflect  as  correctly 
and  as  closely  as  possible  that  which  should  be  carried  on 
in  the  homes  and  on  the  farms,  not  only  are  the  projects 
given  in  the  vocational  subjects  of  a  highly  practical  nature 
but  the  equipment  used,  tools,  benches,  cooking  utensils, 
materials  used  in  making  articles  and  in  preparing  foods, 
are  such  as  are  at  hand  on  the  neighboring  farms.  In  the 
manual-training  classes,  planing,  joining,  squaring,  and  the 
fundamentals  of  primary  woodwork  are  taught  to  the 
younger  boys;  the  making  of  milk-stools,  benches,  wagon- 
jacks,  letter-boxes,  chicken-coops,  yard^gates,  bookcases, 
cement  work,  and  other  projects  of  a  similar  nature  are 
carried  through  the  upper  grades.  The  cooking  is  of  the 
practical  every-day  foods  used  on  the  farms  in  the  commu- 
nity and  a  very  close  estimate  of  costs  and  food  values  is  ad- 
hered to.  The  visitor  found  each  girl  in  the  sewing-class 
making  a  different  garment  or  working  on  a  different  ar- 
ticle. The  girls  are  required  to  do  home  sewing,  and  must 
bring  materials  from  home  for  making  articles  which  are 
needed  and  used  after  completion  in  the  home.  They  have 
freedom  of  choice  as  to  styles,  materials,  etc.,  under  the 
guidance,  of  course,  of  the  teacher  in  charge.  The  aim  is 
both  to  fit  for  and  to  help  improve  the  customary  activities 
of  the  home  and  farm. 

Another  departure  from  the  traditional  rural-school 
curriculum  is  the  teaching  of  music  and  drawing  throughout 
the  course  and  the  emphasis  placed  on  games  and  athletics. 
The  high  school  offers  also  not  only  the  vocational  subjects 
mentioned  but  also  a  reasonable  variety  for  selection  of  his- 
tory, science,  languages,  and  mathematics  which  must  be 
studied  to  prepare  for  the  professional  or  liberal-arts  college 
courses.  The  student  who  wishes  to  enter  a  higher  institu- 
tion and  prepare  for  a  profession  or  for  a  vocation  other 


Girls  gaining  domestic  efficiency- 


Practical  sewing  for  Colorado  girls 
Cache  La  Poudre  School 


A  VISIT  TO  A  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL  I43 

than  farming  has  the  opportunity  by  a  wise  selection  of 
subjects  to  obtain  full  preparation.  The  high-school  depart- 
ment offers  four  years  of  English,  two  of  history,  and  two 
each  of  Latin  and  German,  besides  four  years  of  music  and 
drawing. 

In  these  practical  days  when  so  great  emphasis  is  being 
placed  on  the  education  which  leads  to  better  and  more 
intensive  soil  cultivation  and  a  higher  state  of  productive- 
ness, it  is  well  not  to  lose  sight  of  the  fact  that  improved 
rural  life  is  not  all  mere  bushels  to  the  acre.  The  highest 
mission  of  the  school  is  but  partially  accomplished  when  this 
end  is  reached.  Vocational  efficiency  is  but  one  of  the  five 
social  aims  previously  stated.  Economic  prosperity  must 
be  accompanied  by  spiritual  and  ethical  development  and 
the  ability  for  enjoying  refined  leisure  before  the  country 
school  will  produce  an  intelligent  and  contented  farm  popu- 
lation. To  this  end  more  emphasis  will  probably  be  placed 
in  the  future  on  such  subjects  as  literature,  civics,  ethics, 
and  avocational  subjects. 

Supervised  play  and  school  athletics  also  receive  care- 
ful attention  in  both  the  high  and  elementary  school.  The 
grounds  are  well  equipped  with  home-made  apparatus  for 
the  small  children  and  are  carefully  supervised  by  the 
teachers.  Both  boys  and  girls  have  basket-ball  teams  which 
are  shown  in  the  accompanying  photographs,  as  is  also  the 
football  squad.  We  have  mentioned  the  baseball  diamond 
used  by  pupils  from  the  grades  and  high  school.  The  high- 
school  boys  are  expected  to  spend  one-half  to  one  hour  each 
day  in  some  form  of  athletics.  The  girls  have  gymnastics 
three  days  a  week  and  glee-club  work  two  days. 

IV.     Community  Service 

The  influence  of  the  school  is  not  confined  to  the  walls 
of  the  building  or  the  boundaries  of  the  campus,  but  ex- 
tends to  the  limits  of  the  district  and  even  beyond  it  into 
other  rural  districts  of  the  county.    The  community  gath- 


144  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

erings  begin  in  September  with  the  annual  county  play- 
festival  for  third-class  (rural)  districts  and  continue  until 
the  commencement  programme  closes  the  ''season"  in 
June.  The  programme  for  the  191 6  county  play-festival  is 
given  on  the  opposite  page.  Worthy  of  special  note  are  the 
community  singing,  high-school  orchestra,  and  the  basket 
lunch.  The  inside  gatherings  begin  in  November  and  are 
held  in  the  auditorium  previously  mentioned.  A  lecture 
course  of  seven  numbers  begins  about  November  3  and  ends 
about  March  17.  Reproductions  of  handbill  announce- 
ments are  given  on  accompanying  pages. 

Besides  the  festival  and  lecture  course  the  year's  enter- 
tainment programme  includes  seven  literary  society  eve- 
nings, which  are,  according  to  the  superintendent's  descrip- 
tion, "old-fashioned  lyceums,"  a  box  supper,  ladies'  aid 
supper,  Hallowe'en  social,  Christmas  programme  (school), 
a  lecture  and  play  by  home  talent,  four  political  meetings, 
eight  parent-teacher  association  meetings,  two  plays,  a 
public  auction,  two  receptions,  and  two  commencement 
programmes.  The  announcement  of  the  parent-teacher 
association  for  191 6  is  appended: 

November  8 
Uniform  Dress  in  School  and  Graduation Mrs.  W.  Mullen 

December  6 
Demonstration  of  School  Lunches Miss  Clara  Mellor 

January  3 

Mission  of  the  County  Superintendent 

Larimer  County  Superintendent 

February  7 
Teaching  Children  Thrift J.  A.  Sidney 

March  7 
Rural  Life  in  Home  and  School Mrs.  H.  T.  French 

April  ^ 
Care  of  the  Children's  Teeth Dr.  H.  J.  Livingstone 

May  2 
Special  Programme  by  Girls*  Camp-fire  Organization. 


Larimer  County's  Second  Annual  Play  Festival  for 
Third  Class  School  Districts 

SATURDAY,  SEPTEMBER  16,  1916 

Cache  La  Poudre  Consolidated  School 


Teachers,  Parents,  Pupils  and  Friends  are  Cordially  Invited  to 

Attend.    Come  Early,  Bring  Your  Lunch 

and  Spend  the  Day 


PROGRAM,  10  A.  M. 

MUSIC _. High  School  Orchestra 

ADDRESS  OF,  WELCOME Emma  T.  Wilkins 

MUSIC— THE  COLORADO  STATE  SONG  

School  Children 

THE  VALUE  OP  THE  PARENT-TEACHER  ASSOCIATION. 

. ....... . . .  .Mrs.  John  H.  Weldon,  District  No.  8 

MUSIC     . .  High  School  Orchestra 

A  TALK  AND  DEMONSTRATION  ON  EDUCATIONAL 

GYMNASTICS  IN  OUR  SCHOOLS 

.-,.  .Mrs.  Hiram  T.  Pirench,  Fort  Collins 

STORY  TELLING  ..^......^^ «., 

MUSIC  — ~^.,^.  ...^.^.. „^^ Community  Singihg 

(Noon  Hour— Basket  Lunch) 


PROGRAM,  1:30  P.M. 

50  YARD  DASH-^mLS   \  a  R««  For  F^-h  Pr^rf* 
50  YARD  DASH-BOYS     J  ^  Race  For  Each  Grade 

100  FT.  RACE . .....^^^,,^Member8  of  School  Board 

HIGH  JUMP. 
BROAD  JUMP. 
BASKET  BALL  GAME. 
CAPTAIN  BALL  GAME. 
TUG  OF  WAR. 

SWINGS,  TEETERS,  GUNT  STRIDES,  ETC. 
VARIED  GAMES  FOR  HOME,  PLAYGROUND  AND  NEIGH- 
BORHOOD. 
FOOT  BALL  GAME. 


Reproduction  of  handbill 


145 


Buy  a  Family  Ticket 

TO  THE 

CACHE  LA  POUDRE 

Lecture  Course 

All  Your  Family  to  be  Admitted 

to  the  Seven  Numbers 

for  $1.00 

Dr.    E.    D.    Phillips,    "What  Everybody 
Likes,"  November  4. 

C.  A.  C.  Conservatory  Faculty,  Music  and 
Reading,  November  25. 

Prof.  Jno.   R.  Bell,  "The  Significance  of 
Attitude,"  December  16. 

Colorado     Agricultural     College     Band, 
January  13, 

Prof    H.  D.  Black.   •'The  Cliff  Dwellers." 
February  3. 

C.  A.  C.  Ladies'  Glee  Club.  February  24. 

C  A.  C,  Men's  Glee  Club.  March  17. 

BUY   YOUR   TICKET  NOW 


Th«  Mernint  Sxprct*  Print 

Reproduction  of  handbill 


146 


A  VISIT  TO  A  CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL  I47 

Up  to  the  date  of  writing  (February,  191 7)  the  various 
entertainment  features  have  attracted  during  the  present 
year  an  aggregate  attendance  of  3,000  people.  Family  tickets 
at  $1  each  for  the  lecture  course  have  been  sold  to  120 
families. 

Besides  these  activities,  the  regular  school  election  day 
in  May  is  made  the  occasion  of  a  kind  of  spring  festival. 
It  has  become  the  custom  since  consolidation  to  include 
among  the  board  membership  a  resident  of  each  of  the  old 
districts  as  they  existed  before  consolidation  in  order  to 
keep  the  board  as  representative  as  possible.  A  half-holiday 
is  declared  and  a  programme  is  given  by  the  school.  An  ex- 
hibit of  the  year's  work,  both  manual  and  academic,  is 
shown;  articles  made  in  the  manual-training  department  are 
auctioned  off,  and  a  food  sale  is  managed  by  the  cooking 
classes.  The  proceeds  of  this  sale  supply  much  of  the  ma- 
terial used  during  the  school  term  for  cooking  and  manual 
training.  The  voting  for  school-board  members  follows  the 
above  programme.  It  is  not  difficult  to  see  how  community 
spirit  is  preserved  and  promoted  in  the  district,  co-operation 
between  parents  and  teachers  encouraged,  school  pride 
strengthened,  and  the  spirit  of  fellowship  which  fosters  the 
desire  to  keep  the  board  representative  of  the  whole  of  the 
consolidated  territory  maintained.  Altogether  we  have  here 
the  beginnings  of  a  type  of  school  far  superior  and  infinitely 
more  progressive  than  the  type  of  schools  displaced.  As 
an  experiment  in  a  new  type  of  rural  education  the  con- 
solidated school  is  very  promising.  That  it  will  immensely 
improve  as  time  goes  on  is  to  be  expected  in  democratic,  pro- 
gressive America. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  What  features  of  this  particular  school  most  appeal  to  you  as 

worth  while? 

2.  What  features  would  you  condemn? 

3.  If  possible,  learn  of  later  improvements  in  the  school. 


148  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

4.  In  the  first  edition  of  the  editor's  "  Educational  Hygiene  '*  the 

school  building  of  this  school  is  by  a  typographical  error  called 
model  instead  of  modern.  In  what  ways  do  you  consider  the 
lighting  arrangements  inferior  to  the  Jordan  school  of  Utah,  the 
Sargent  of  Colorado,  or  the  one-story  type  suggested  in  Chap- 
ter IX? 

5.  Read  Doctor  Foght's  account  of  the  Jordan  and  other  consoli- 

dated schools  in  his  "The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work," 
chaps.  IV  and  V. 

6.  Other  members  of  your  study  group  may  report  on  other  con- 

solidated schools,  such  as  the  Sargent  School  at  Fort  Collins, 
Colorado,  the  schools  described  in  Monahan's  bulletin  on 
consolidation  mentioned  previously,  and  any  that  are  described 
in  State  and  county  school  reports.  Many  States  have  special 
bulletins  on  consolidation  with  descriptions  of  some  of  the  best 
schools.  What  are  the  advantages  of  the  one-story  school 
building  in  the  country? 

7.  Why  do  children  attend  the  consolidated  school  better  than  the 

one-room  school  ?     Give  reasons. 

8.  Is  this  school  at  Cache  La  Poudre  a  true  community-centre  school  ? 

9.  What  does  it  do  for  the  recreation  of  the  community?     Why 

should  the  rural  curriculum  include  cultural,   or  avocational, 
as  well  as  vocational  and  other  subjects? 
10.  How  does  it  attempt  to  improve  home  and  farm  conditions? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The  bibliography  has  been  indicated  in  the  problems  in  applica- 
tion.    See  also  bibliography  at  end  of  the  volume. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  SITE  AND   ITS  USE 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  out-of-door  activities  are  desirable  at  a  consolidated  school? 

2.  For  what  purposes  is  a  school-farm  desirable? 

3.  What  should  be  the  size  of  such  a  farm? 

4.  How  much  space  is  desirable  for  a  playground,  athletic  field,  and 

out-of-door  recreation  centre? 

5.  What  kinds  of  soil  are  unsuited  for  such  activities? 

6.  What  are  some  of  the  principal  mistakes  made  in  selecting  con- 

solidated-school sites  ? 

7.  What  types  of  sites  should  be  avoided? 

8.  Describe  the  uses  to  which  a  good  consolidated-school  site  of 

which  you  have  knowledge  is  put? 

9.  What  play  apparatus  is  desirable  for  such  a  site? 

10.  What  buildings  are  desirable  at  a  first-class  consolidated  school? 

I.    The  Larger  School  Plant 

The  Modem  versus  the  Old  Consolidated-School  Idea. 
— In  discussing  consolidated  schools  in  the  introductory 
chapter  of  his  annual  report  for  1913,  Doctor  P.  P.  Claxton, 
United  States  Commissioner  of  Education,  says: 

When  such  consolidation  is  made,  a  good  schoolhouse  should  be 
built,  attractive,  comfortable,  and  sanitary,  with  classrooms,  labora- 
tories, and  library,  and  an  assembly-hall  large  enough  not  only  to 
seat  comfortably  all  the  pupils  of  the  school  but  also  to  serve  as  a 
meeting-place  for  the  people  of  the  district.  For  the  principal's 
home  a  house  should  be  built  on  the  school  grounds.  This  house 
should  not  be  expensive,  but  neat  and  attractive,  a  model  for  the  com- 
munity, such  a  house  as  any  thrifty  farmer  with  good  taste  might  hope 
to  build  or  have  built  for  himself.  And  as  a  part  of  the  equipment  of 
the  school  there  should  be  a  small  farm,  from  4  to  5  acres  if  in  a  vil- 
lage or  densely  populated  community,  and  from  25  to  50  acres  if  in 

149 


150  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

the  open  countiy.  The  principal  of  the  school  should  be  required  to 
live  in  the  principal's  home,  keep  it  as  a  model  home  for  the  commu- 
nity and  cultivate  the  farm  as  a  model  farm,  with  garden,  orchard, 
poultry-yard,  dairy,  and  whatever  else  should  be  found  on  a  well- 
conducted,  well-tilled  farm  in  that  community.  He  should  put  him- 
self into  close  contact  with  the  agricultural  college  and  agricultural 
experiment  station  of  his  State,  the  departments  of  agriculture  of 
State  and  nation,  farm-demonstration  agents,  and  other  similar  agen- 
cies, and  it  should  be  made  their  duty  to  help  him  in  every  way  possi- 
ble. The  use  of  the  house  and  the  products  of  the  farm  should  be 
given  the  principal  as  a  part  of  his  salary,  in  addition  to  the  salary 
now  paid  in  money.  After  a  satisfactory  trial  of  a  year  or  two  a  con- 
tract should  be  made  with  the  principal  for  life  or  good  behavior,  or 
at  least  for  a  long  term  of  years. 

In  this  way  it  would  be  possible  to  get  and  keep  in  the  schools 
men  of  first-class  ability,  competent  to  teach  children  and  to  become 
leaders  in  their  communities.  The  principal  of  a  country  school 
should  know  country  life.  A  large  part  of  country  life  has  to  do  with 
the  cultivation  and  care  of  the  farm.  The  best  test  here  as  elsewhere 
is  the  ability  to  do.  The  principal  of  a  country  school  in  a  farming 
community  should  be  able  to  cultivate  and  care  for  a  small  farm 
better  than,  or  at  least  as  well  as,  any  other  man  in  the  com- 
munity. 

This  summarizes  some  of  the  principal  considerations 
relative  to  the  site  and  the  uses  of  the  site  of  the  modern 
consolidated  school  established  to  teach  country  boys  and 
girls  in  terms  of  rural  Hfe  and  industries.  Most  of  the 
earlier  consolidated  schools  were  located  in  villages.  This 
was  particularly  so  in  Massachusetts,  where  the  term  in  gen- 
eral use,  "town  school"  instead  of  consolidated  school,  in- 
dicates the  location.  It  was  a  school  to  serve  the  entire 
town  or  township,  and  was  as  a  rule  located  in  the  village 
at  the  most  central  point  so  far  as  the  population  was  con- 
cerned. It  meant  that  the  school  in  the  village  was  en- 
larged and  schools  in  the  surrounding  farming  sections  were 
closed,  and  the  children  brought  in  to  the  town.  This  was 
true  also  in  Indiana  and  in  Ohio,  where  the  term  centralized 
school  was  adopted  instead  of  consolidated.  The  tendency 
in  the  past  few  years  is  to  locate  the  consolidated  school  in 


THE   CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  SITE  AND  ITS  USE      151 

the  country  where  several  acres  of  land  are  available  for 
playground  and  for  agricultural  purposes.  It  usually  must 
be  adjacent  to  a  village,  as  has  been  clearly  indicated  in 
preceding  chapters,  but  so  located  that  it  may  become  a 
real  rural  school,  teaching  in  terms  of  rural  life  and  giving 
opportunities  for  vocational  education  in  rural  occupations 
to  boys  and  girls  of  twelve  to  eighteen  years  of  age.  It  is  no 
longer  merely  a  city  school  for  country  boys  with  city  text- 
books, courses  of  study,  and  city  methods.  The  trading- 
centre  people  working  with  and  for  the  country  can  and 
should  be  educated  with  those  with  whom  they  are  to  live 
and  co-operate. 

A  Tennessee  Consolidated-School  Site. — An  excellent 
example  of  a  consolidated  school  with  an  ideal  site  put  to 
good  use  is  the  Farragut  School  of  Concord,  Tennessee.  It 
is  in  the  open  country,  a  mile  from  the  nearest  village. 

II.    The  Building  and  Its  Site 

The  Farragut  School. — The  building  is  a  two-story 
brick  structure  with  basement,  and  cost,  with  the  original 
equipment,  $12,000.  Additional  equipment  and  a  water 
system  installed  since  have  brought  the  total  cost  of  the 
school  up  to  about  $17,000.  The  high-school  department 
occupies  the  second  floor,  one  large  room  on  the  first  floor, 
and  part  of  the  basement.  Three  other  rooms  on  the  first 
floor  are  occupied  by  the  elementary  school.  The  household- 
economics  room,  the  girls'  lunch  and  toilet  rooms  occupy 
one-half  of  the  basement.  The  manual-training  room,  the 
boys'  lunch  and  toilet  rooms  occupy  the  other  half.  On  the 
second  floor  nearly  one-half  of  the  space  is  occupied  by  a 
study  hall,  in  which  all  high-school  pupils  are  assigned  desks. 
There  is  space  for  additional  seats  whenever  it  is  desirable 
to  use  the  room  as  an  auditorium  or  assembly-hall.  When 
properly  arranged  as  an  assembly-hall,  it  will  seat  300  per- 
sons.   The  renjiainder  of  the  second  floor  is  divided  into  a 


152  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

hallway  and  three  rooms — two  recitation-rooms  and  a  li- 
brary. 

On  the  school  grounds  is  located  a  cottage  for  the  prin- 
cipal, the  use  of  which  is  given  to  him  rent  free.  The  build- 
ing is  plain  and  simple,  but  well  arranged  and  adequate  for 
the  purpose  for  which  it  was  built.  It  is  equipped  with  a 
complete  bathroom,  private  toilet  for  servant,  and  a  ''cool 
room,"  with  concrete  sink,  through  which  water  is  kept 
running  in  warm  weather.  This  serves  as  a  refrigerator. 
The  cost  of  this  cottage  was  very  small,  as  the  main  part  of 
the  cottage  consists  of  one  of  the  abandoned  schoolhouses  of 
the  district  moved  here  and  remodelled. 

At  the  junction  of  the  Kingston  Pike  and  the  Concord 
Pike,  at  the  corner  of  the  school  grounds,  a  concrete  water- 
box  for  horses  and  a  public  drinking-fountain  with  concrete 
bowl  and  base  for  people  have  been  erected.  The  fountain 
has  proved  to  be  of  great  convenience,  not  only  to  the  com- 
munity but  also  to  travellers  on  the  pike.  The  money  for 
the  water-box  and  fountain  was  subscribed  by  the  pupils, 
teachers,  and  patrons  of  the  school.  Every  pupil  subscribed, 
and  has  therefore  a  feeling  of  ownership.  As  much  of  the 
work  as  possible  was  done  by  the  high-school  boys  in  the 
manual-training  classes.  On  the  water-box,  in  brass  letters, 
are  these  words:  Erected  by  the  Farragut  School  and  Com- 
munity,  1 9 10.  On  the  fountain  are  the  words:  Farragut 
Drinking  Fountain. 

In  addition  to  the  school  building  and  the  principal's 
home,  situated  on  the  school  grounds,  there  are  a  barn  and  a 
chicken-house.  The  school  owns  a  brood  mare  and  several 
Percheron  colts;  it  also  owns  a  flock  of  pure-bred  Plymouth 
Rock  chickens.  The  mare,  colts,  and  the  chickens  are  the 
only  animals  owned  by  the  school,  and  are  used  for  teaching 
the  principles  of  breeding  and  for  other  instructional  pur- 
poses. The  chicken-house  is  fitted  with  good,  substantial 
equipment,  including  trap-nests,  so  that  it  is  possible  to 
keep  a  careful  record  of  the  number  of  eggs  laid  by  each 


A  model  barn  in  North  Carolina 


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iilli  1  llr  feirr^ilBi^JiiiliililM 

M|MH||g  H-  ^l^Hi 

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A  model  barn  at  a  country-life  school 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL   SITE  AND  ITS  USE      1 53 

hen.  The  principles  of  selection  and  breeding,  which  may 
be  demonstrated  so  easily  with  poultry,  apply  with  equal 
force  to  all  kinds  of  animals. 

The  School  Grounds. — In  addition  to  the  12  acres 
which  the  school  owns,  it  has  leased  for  a  period  of  years  8 
acres  adjoining  its  property. 

The  lot  owned  by  the  school  is  divided  into  two  parts; 
6  acres  about  the  buildings  are  in  permanent  grass  for  play- 
grounds; the  other  6  acres  are  used  for  demonstration  pur- 
poses. The  school  employs  one  man  by  the  year  to  serve 
both  as  janitor  and  farm  laborer.  The  grass-plat  immedi- 
ately surrounding  the  buildings  has  been  beautified  by  the 
addition  of  shrubbery  and  flower-beds.  Part  of  it  is  laid 
out  for  a  baseball-field,  for  tennis  courts,  and  for  an  out  door 
basket-ball  court.  These  playgrounds  are  used  by  the  com- 
munity at  any  time,  and  their  use  constitutes  one  of  the 
principal  contributions  of  the  school  to  the  community. 

Demonstration  Plats. — The  chief  aim  in  the  demonstra- 
tion work  has  been  to  show  the  farmer  and  the  pupils  in  the 
agricultural  courses  how  to  bring  the  soil  from  a  state  of 
low  fertility  to  a  state  of  high  fertility  in  the  shortest  possi- 
ble time.  The  plats  are  used  for  demonstration  and  not  for 
experimental  purposes.  One  demonstration  of  particular 
interest  is  conducted  on  a  half-acre  of  land  divided  into  40 
plats.  The  half-acre  is  divided  first  into  four  ranges.  Each 
range  is  divided  lengthwise  into  two  parts.  One-half  of  each 
has  had  an  application  of  two  tons  of  ground  limestone  per 
acre.  On  these  ranges  are  conducted  a  rotation  and  a  fer- 
tilizer demonstration,  planned  to  show  side  by  side  the 
four  phases  of  a  four-year  rotation.  The  following  is  a  de- 
scription by  the  principal: 

In  the  summer  of  1913  range  A  has  rye  ploughed  under  for  cow-peas. 
Range  B  is  in  wheat,  seeded  with  clover  and  timothy.  Range  C  is  in 
clover  and  timothy.  Range  D  is  in  corn.  The  cow-peas  of  range  A 
will  be  turned  under  for  wheat  in  the  fall.  Thus  the  crops  follow  one 
another  in  regular  succession,  each  range  bearing  the  same  crop  once 


154  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

in  four  years.  The  ranges  are  divided  crosswise  into  lo  parts  of  one- 
eightieth  of  an  acre  each.  Plats  5  and  6  receive  no  fertilizer  and  serve 
as  checks.  Each  of  the  other  8  plats  has  a  different  application  of  fer- 
tilizer. From  this  demonstration  the  students  and  people  of  the  com- 
munity are  learning  two  very  important  lessons:  First,  that  the  soil 
is  very  poor  in  nitrogen,  and  that  the  quickest  and  most  economical 
way  to  increase  the  nitrogen  supply  to  the  soil  is  to  grow  and  turn  un- 
der large  crops  of  leguminous  plants,  such  as  vetch,  cow-peas,  and  soy- 
beans, which  gather  and  convert  into  plant  food  the  free  nitrogen  of 
the  air.  The  second  lesson  is  the  value  of  an  application  of  ground 
limestone.  The  difference  between  the  limed  and  unlimed  sections  of 
the  ranges  is  very  apparent  at  any  time  during  the  growing  season 
and  is  also  apparent  at  the  time  of  harvest.  Many  farmers  in  the  com- 
munity have  profited  by  the  lessons;  some  have  not.  The  great  value 
of  rotation  demonstration  is  that  the  demonstration  keeps  going  on 
and  on.  It  tells  its  story  each  year.  The  story  is  more  impressive 
each  succeeding  year.  The  lesson  becomes  plainer  and  more  valuable 
as  the  time  goes  by. 

Another  part  of  the  6  acres  is  used  as  a  model  garden. 
It  is  known  in  the  community  as  the  "principal's  garden." 
The  rest  of  the  land  is  used  for  general  crops,  particularly 
to  furnish  fodder  for  the  horse,  colts,  and  poultry.  The 
model  garden  and  the  use  made  of  the  rented  land  are  de- 
scribed by  the  principal  as  follows: 

The  most  important  field  on  the  farm  is  the  home  garden.  The 
principal's  garden  consists  of  one  acre  of  land  enclosed  by  a  woven-wire 
fence.  It  is  planned  as  a  model  for  the  busy  farmer  who  must  do  as 
much  of  his  work  as  possible  with  a  horse.  Everything  is  in  rows  far 
enough  apart  for  the  one-horse  cultivator.  All  of  the  common  vegeta- 
bles and  small  fruits  are  planned  for.  Here  intensive  tillage,  crop 
rotation,  the  use  of  fertilizers  and  stable  manure,  and  the  ploughing 
under  of  leguminous  cover  crops  are  all  practised  to  a  great  extent. 

Four  acres  of  the  rented  land  have  been  divided  into  one-acre  plats, 
upon  which  is  to  be  carried  on  a  four-year  crop-rotation  demonstra- 
tion. The  idea  in  this  is  that  not  only  shall  the  plats  be  large  enough 
to  be  cultivated  with  two-horse  implements,  hke  the  fields  of  a  farm, 
but  that  there  shall  be  measured  equal  tracts  which  may  be  used  as 
a  basis  to  compare  the  results  at  the  school  with  the  results  obtained 
by  the  boys  in  the  agricultural  course  who  are  members  of  the  boys' 
corn  club  and  with  those  of  farmers  in  the  community  who  are  carry- 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  SITE  AND  ITS  USE      1 55 

ing  on  co-operative  demonstrations.  The  other  four  acres  of  rented 
land  will  be  devoted  to  pasture  demonstrations.  One-half  of  the  field 
will  be  seeded  for  permanent  pasture.  The  other  half  will  be  used  to 
show  how,  by  proper  selection  of  cereals,  clovers,  and  grasses,  good 
pasture  may  be  obtained  for  nearly  all  seasons  of  the  year. 

Community  Service. — The  Farragut  School  means  more 
to  the  community  than  the  ordinary  school  which  confines 
its  attention  to  instructing  the  boys  and  girls  who  come  to 
it  as  pupils.  It  is  attempting  to  be  an  institution  of  the 
widest  use  and  of  direct  value  to  every  man,  woman,  and 
child  in  the  community.  The  following  are  some  of  the  ways 
in  which  the  school  is  serving  the  community: 

On  the  last  Friday  night  before  each  full  moon  there  have 
been  held  at  the  schoolhouse,  for  the  past  eight  years,  meet- 
ings called  "moonlight  socials."  These  are  community 
gatherings  to  which  all  are  welcome.  The  programme  varies 
from  meeting  to  meeting.  There  is  always  a  liberal  allow- 
ance of  music  and  usually  a  talk  on  a  subject  of  general  in- 
terest pertaining  to  some  phase  of  farm  and  home  life. 
Sometimes  the  talks  are  given  by  outside  persons,  from  the 
State  Agricultural  College  or  elsewhere.  More  often,  how- 
ever, there  is  a  general  discussion  of  a  selected  subject,  led 
by  a  few  members  of  the  community  selected  before  the 
meeting.  If  the  subject  to  be  discussed  deals  with  tech- 
nical phases  of  agriculture  in  which  they  are  not  interested, 
the  women  will  meet  in  another  room  and  discuss  some  prob- 
lem of  housekeeping.  The  discussions  are  made  as  prac- 
tical as  possible.  After  the  regular  programme  is  over  the 
evening  is  given  to  general  sociability,  playing  games,  and 
singing  familiar  songs.  Usually  some  sort  of  lunch  is  served. 
The  domestic-science  room  has  facilities  which  make  the 
serving  of  a  lunch  very  easy.  The  meetings  are  well  at- 
tended and  have  become  a  very  important  part  of  the  com- 
munity life.  Other  evening  meetings  are  held  in  the  school- 
house  on  many  special  occasions.  If  the  people  of  the  com- 
munity desire  to  get  together  for  any  purpose,  the  school- 
house  is  always  designated  as  the  place  of  meeting. 


156  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

The  biggest  meeting  of  the  year,  however,  is  on  Com- 
mencement Day.  The  programme  lasts  all  day.  In  the 
forenoon  the  graduating  exercises  take  place,  with  essays 
or  short  talks  by  members  of  the  graduating  class.  These 
essays  and  talks  are  usually  upon  subjects  pertaining  to 
farm  and  country  life,  and  are  therefore  of  more  interest  to 
the  audience  than  the  ordinary  high-school  graduation  essay 
or  oration.  At  this  forenoon  meeting  the  graduates  receive 
their  diplomas.  At  noon  a  basket-dinner  is  served  on  the 
grounds  under  the  large  shade  trees.  The  food  contributed 
by  each  family  is  put  in  a  common  lot  and  served  as  a  com- 
munity dinner.  The  domestic-science  room  is  utilized  to 
make  the  lunch  more  complete.  This  plan  helps  make  the 
lunch  hour  a  real  social  hour.  After  dinner  the  visitors  in- 
spect the  plat  demonstrations  in  rotation  of  crops,  and  the 
progress  of  the  various  crops  under  the  different  treatments 
is  noted.  The  features  of  the  demonstration  are  explained 
by  the  principal  of  the  school.  At  two  o'clock  the  people 
assemble  in  the  school,  and  there  is  a  commencement  ad- 
dress, usually  by  some  prominent  outside  speaker.  Follow- 
ing this  is  a  baseball  game  between  the  high-school  team 
and  either  a  team  from  some  other  school  or  a  selected  team 
from  among  the  farmers  of  the  community.  In  the  evening 
a  drama  is  presented  by  the  students  of  the  school.  This 
part  of  the  programme  creates  great  interest  and  is  always 
well  attended. 

Another  service  of  the  school  is  in  furnishing  agricultural 
reading  for  the  farmers  and  their  wives  in  the  community. 
The  school  library  contains  about  200  books  and  a  large 
number  of  government  reports.  It  also  contains  about 
4,000  bulletins  from  various  experiment  stations  in  the 
United  States.  There  is  an  abundance  of  valuable  reading 
in  these  bulletins  which  is  not  ordinarily  available  for 
farmers,  because  they  have  no  way  of  determining  where 
the  most  valuable  material  is  to  be  found.  This  school  has 
been  very  successful  in  its  attempts  to  overcome  this  diffi- 
culty.   One  teacher  of  the  school  examines  all  bulletins  re- 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  SITE  AND  ITS  USE      1 57 

ceived.  He  notes  particularly  what  in  the  bulletins  is  of 
value  to  the  farmers  and  housekeepers  in  the  territory 
served  by  the  school.  He  therefore  not  only  has  informa- 
tion on  the  particular  subject  discussed  by  the  bulletins  but 
also  is  able  to  put  into  the  hands  of  the  people  of  his  com- 
munity the  material  which  will  be  of  most  value  to  them. 
All  the  bulletins  and  books  of  the  library  are  constantly  in 
circulation  in  the  community  and  are  available  for  young 
and  old  people  alike.  The  school  building  is  open  on 
Wednesdays  and  Saturdays  throughout  the  summer  vaca- 
tion for  those  who  care  to  visit  the  library  to  consult  the 
books  and  bulletins  in  the  library  or  to  get  books,  reports, 
bulletins,  or  periodicals  for  home  reading. 

During  the  vacations  the  school  playgrounds  are  used 
freely  by  people  in  the  district.  They  are,  in  fact,  commu- 
nity playgrounds,  on  which  the  boys  gather  for  baseball  and 
other  games  whenever  their  duties  permit.  The  tennis- 
courts  and  basket-ball  courts  are  in  considerable  demand. 
The  school  and  its  property  are  regarded  by  the  individuals 
of  the  community  as  belonging  to  them,  and  they  are  wel- 
come at  all  times  to  make  any  use  of  them  which  does  not 
work  injury  to  the  school.  On  days  during  the  summer 
vacation  on  which  the  school  library  is  open  the  shower- 
baths  are  also  open  and  many  visitors  use  them. 

The  school  grounds  and  demonstration  plats  are  open 
to  inspection  at  all  times,  and  farmers  driving  by  frequently 
stop  to  examine  the  crops.  Many  of  them  visit  the  plats 
at  regular  periods  and  study  carefully  their  progress. 

Another  important  community  service  comes  through 
the  outside  activities  of  the  principal  of  the  school.  He  has 
become  an  expert  adviser  in  agriculture  to  all  the  farmers 
of  the  community.  He  is  employed  throughout  the  year, 
and  a  horse  is  furnished  him.  When  school  is  not  in  session 
he  spends  much  of  his  time  in  driving  about  the  commu- 
nity, visiting  the  farmers  on  their  farms,  and  getting  in  touch 
with  local  agricultural  conditions  and  problems.     This  en- 


158  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

ables  him  to  know  well  the  agricultural  conditions  of  the 
community,  to  adapt  the  work  of  the  school  to  the  needs  of 
the  community  as  he  finds  them,  to  bring  to  each  farmer 
expert  advice  for  his  own  particular  needs,  and  to  give  to 
all  information  in  regard  to  the  best  things  done  by  any. 
It  also  enables  him  to  keep  in  touch  with  the  boys'  corn- 
club  work  and  other  agricultural  work,  and  to  see  that  in 
their  practical  work  on  the  farm  they  apply  the  principles 
learned  in  school. 


III.    Wake  County  (N.  C.)  School-Farm  Movement 

Another  Example. — A  unique  plan  for  the  use  of  the 
school  site  was  developed  five  years  ago  in  Wake  County, 
North  Carolina,  under  the  leadership  of  Z.  V.  Judd,  then 
county  superintendent  of  public  instruction.  The  plan  is 
called  the  ''School-Farm  Movement,"  and  comprehends  the 
establishment  of  a  small  farm  of  from  two  to  ten  acres  in 
connection  with  every  country  school.  This  farm  is  culti- 
vated by  the  children  and  their  parents,  working  together 
on  certain  days  in  what  Mr.  Judd  terms  "school-farm  work- 
ing bees."  The  working  bees  are  gatherings  for  social  pur- 
poses, as  well  as  for  the  cultivation  of  the  school  land.  Each 
school-farm  is  usually  given  to  one  crop.  A  regular  system 
of  rotation  is  planned.  The  agricultural  work  is  done  un- 
der the  supervision  of  the  best  farmer  in  the  community,  so 
that  good  methods  are  used.  Every  person,  therefore,  tak- 
ing part  is  given  the  opportunity  to  observe  the  most  suc- 
cessful systems  of  raising  the  crops  under  cultivation.  The 
income  received  from  the  sale  of  the  products  raised  on  the 
school-farm  is  used  for  general  school  purposes. 

It  is  hoped  by  this  movement  to  accomplish  three 
things:  first,  to  make  money  to  be  used  in  supplementing 
the  school  fund;  second,  to  offer  an  opportunity  to  make 
the  teaching  of  agriculture  in  the  rural  school  entirely  prac- 
tical and  to  illustrate  how  pleasant  farm  work  can  be  made 


Play  at  a  consolidated  school,  Preble  County,  Ohio 


Supervised  play  at  a  consolidated  sjhool  in  JNlarion  County,  Ohio 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  SITE  AND  ITS  USE      1 59 

under  proper  conditions;  and,  third,  to  offer  rural  commu- 
nities opportunities  for  gatherings  to  develop  the  social  side 
of  farm  life,  with  the  schoolhouse  the  social  centre  of  the 
community  and  the  principal  occupation  of  the  people, 
farming,  the  centre  of  interest. 

The  first  work  was  done  at  Holly  Springs,  where  seven 
years  ago  two  acres  of  land  were  planted  in  cotton.  The 
lighter  work  was  done  by  the  women  and  children.  A 
community  dinner  was  a  part  of  the  programme  for  each 
gathering.  Two  bales  of  cotton  were  raised,  netting  the 
school  $119.  The  next  year  the  plan  was  tried  at  eleven 
schools,  the  crops  raised  including  cotton,  corn,  tobacco, 
and  wheat.  On  the  eleven  farms  1,200  persons  participated 
in  the  work.  The  net  profit  was  nearly  $1,200.  The  next 
year  six  additional  farms  were  established,  making  a  total  of 
seventeen  farms. 

The  children  of  the  county  want  these  school-farms,  and 
the  older  people  are  in  sympathy  with  the  idea.  The  re- 
sults have  been  an  increased  interest  in  the  schools  and  the 
school  work,  an  improvement  in  the  appearance  of  the 
buildings  and  grounds,  and  the  lengthening  of  the  school 
year;  also  the  development  of  a  better  community  spirit 
and  an  improvement  in  general  farming  in  the  county. 

Information  concerning  the  Wake  County  plan  has 
spread  to  all  parts  of  the  country  and  it  has  been  adopted  in 
many  other  places. 

Character  of  the  Site. — The  site  of  the  Farragut  School 
was  well  selected.  The  country  is  rolling,  the  school  build- 
ing and  principal's  cottage  stand  on  an  elevation  25  or  30 
feet  higher  than  the  roadway,  100  feet  in  front.  The  entire 
20  acres  have  good  natural  drainage.  The  elevation  is  not 
high  enough  to  be  too  exposed  to  winter  winds.  The  soil  is 
a  sandy  loam  with  fertility  enough  to  make  cultivation 
profitable.  The  principalis  garden  and  the  demonstration 
plats  are  in  an  excellent  state  of  cultivation.  The  site,  in  a 
word,  includes  all  the  essentials  that  the  desirable  school 


l6o  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

site  in  the  country  district  should  include.  Its  location  at 
the  crossroads  of  two  main  pikes  makes  it  accessible  from 
four  directions. 

If  the  site  of  the  building  were  not  perfectly  drained  by 
natural  drainage,  considerable  expense  would  have  been 
necessary  to  lay  tiles.  It  would  be  exceedingly  unwise  to 
build  a  structure  of  the  size  of  the  building  needed  for  a 
consolidated  school  with  from  four  to  a  dozen  classrooms 
without  substantial  foundations,  and  such  cannot  be  had 
except  with  good  drainage,  natural  or  otherwise. 

Water-Supply. — The  Farragut  School  has  an  excellent 
water-supply,  although  the  cost  was  greater  than  is  ordi- 
narily necessary,  if  available  water  is  considered  in  the  selec- 
tion of  the  site.  The  new  system  was  installed  in  191 1 
at  a  cost  of  $3,000  after  well-water  had  been  used  for  seven 
years.  Water  is  taken  from  a  spring  1,200  feet  away  from 
and  below  the  school  building.  It  is  pumped  to  the  building 
and  into  two  1,000-gallon  tanks  in  the  attic  by  a  No.  40 
double-acting  Rife  ram,  with  a  capacity  of  3,600  gallons 
per  day.  The  ram  is  driven  by  creek-water,  but  delivers 
only  spring-water  to  the  buildings.  From  the  tanks,  water 
is  conveyed  to  all  parts  of  the  school  building,  to  the  prin- 
cipal's house,  the  barn,  and  to  the  drinking-fountain  on 
the  pike.  In  the  hall  on  the  second  floor  are  two  sanitary 
drinking-fountains  for  the  high  school.  On  the  lower  floor 
there  are  two  more  for  the  elementary  school.  There  is  a 
drinking-fountain  in  each  lunch-room.  There  are  two  sinks 
and  one  wash-bowl  in  the  domestic-economy  room,  one 
wash-bowl  in  the  manual-training  room,  and  three  sinks  in 
the  science  laboratory. 

Each  toilet-room  is  equipped  with  six  Douglas-siphon- jet 
closets,  two  wash-bowls,  two  plate-glass  mirrors,  and  two 
shower-baths  with  dressing-rooms.  All  sinks  and  wash- 
bowls are  furnished  with  liquid-soap  dispensers  and  paper 
towels.  The  partitions  between  the  closets  are  galvanized 
iron  painted  with  white  enamel.  The  girls'  shower-baths 
are  enclosed  with  white  enamelled  iron;  the  boys'  shower- 


THE   CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  SITE  AND  ITS  USE      l6l 

baths  with  white  enamelled  wood.  The  walls  of  the  base- 
ment are  all  painted  white.  The  floor  is  of  concrete.  All 
sinks,  bowls,  and  showers  are  supplied  with  hot  water,  the 
former  from  a  300-gallon  hot-water  tank  connected  with  a 
coil  in  the  furnace  and  also  with  a  special  tank-heater,  with  a 
capacity  of  250  gallons  per  hour,  to  be  used  when  there  is 
no  fire  in  the  furnace. 

If  a  site  as  good  otherwise  could  have  been  found  with 
water  available  by  digging  or  driving  a  well,  the  water- 
supply  would  have  been  secured  at  a  less  expense.  The 
driven  well  is  as  a  rule  very  satisfactory,  and  for  storage 
and  pressure  the  pneumatic  tank  is  more  satisfactory  than 
the  tank  in  the  attic  or  cupola. 

IV.    Factors  in  the  Selection  of  the  School  Site 

Many  of  the  most  important  factors  in  the  selection  of 
the  school  site  are  discussed  above  in  the  description  of  the 
Farragut  School.  One  consideration  not  mentioned  is  in 
regard  to  the  surroundings.  Particular  care  should  be  taken 
to  see  that  the  school  is  not  located  adjacent  to  ill-smelling 
places,  such  as  stables,  nor  near  noisy  disturbances,  such  as 
cattle-yards  and  railroads.  Not  only  is  the  noise  of  passing 
trains  distracting  but  there  is  danger,  particularly  during 
play  hours,  of  children  in  their  games  running  upon  the 
tracks  and,  because  of  the  noise  and  excitement  of  the  play, 
not  hearing  approaching  trains. 

The  Playground. — The  need  of  a  good  playground  can- 
not be  overemphasized.  It  has  been  generally  assumed  in 
the  past  that  for  the  country  school  no  playground  need  be 
provided,  because  country  boys  and  girls  do  not  need  to 
play,  as  they  have  plenty  of  physical  exercise  in  their  home 
work.  This  shows  no  real  conception  of  the  value  of  play. 
Its  chief  value  is  its  socializing  effect  and  the  pleasure  that 
it  gives.  Both  are  especially  needed  in  the  life  of  the  coun- 
try boy  and  girl. 


l62 


THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 


Farming  in  the  past  has  been  an  individualistic  life;  the 
farmer's  most  prominent  characteristic  has  been  individ- 
ualism. Most  games  teach  team-work  and  co-operation. 
Such  things  learned  in  play  in  early  life  become  in  later 
life  a  factor  in  work  and  living.    Besides,  co-operative  play 


Total  area  of 
School  Orounds 


QneRoom 
Tovmship 
Schools 


Area  avail&ble 
for  organized  iflfly 

B 


Ornamentation  of 
School  Orounds 


Centmlizcdt 


Schools 


nn 


■less  then  1  acre 
Ol  acre  and  more 


Proportion  having 
■llesjtHan-J^acre 


131^  acre  and  more 

School  Sites  in  Ohio 
From  The  Rural  School  Survey 


Proportion  ie^ 
■Poor  B  Fair 
OOood 


teaches  the  proper  attitude  toward  fellow  players  and 
workers;  it  develops  grace  and  suppleness,  it  quickens  the 
wits,  and  it  creates  a  joy  in  living. 

The  school  site  should  be  of  ample  size  so  that  good  play- 
grounds may  be  provided.  There  should  be  separate  sec- 
tions for  the  younger  children,  the  older  boys,  and  the  older 
girls.  There  should  be  a  space  large  enough  for  a  baseball- 
field,  so  that  baseball  may  be  played  without  danger  to  the 
little  children.  There  should  be  space  for  basket-ball  and 
volley-ball  for  both  boys  and  girls,  and  other  space  for 
playground  apparatus,  such  as  swings,  seesaws,  sand-boxes, 
etc.,   for  the  smaller  children.     Altogether,   at  least  five 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  SITE  AND  ITS  USE      1 63 

acres  should  be  provided  for  playgrounds  for  the  consoli- 
dated school  with  200  to  3cx>  children  of  from  6  to  18  years 
of  age. 

On  the  days  when  the  school  is  in  session  the  playgrounds 
should  be  for  the  exclusive  use  of  the  pupils.  In  the  eve- 
nings, on  Saturdays,  and  during  vacations  they  should  be 
open  to  the  boys  and  girls  of  the  entire  district.  In  fact, 
special  efforts  should  be  made  to  encourage  the  young  men 
and  older  farm  boys  to  meet  upon  the  school  ball-field  for 
baseball  and  athletic  contests  as  often  as  possible.  It  not 
only  is  of  benefit  to  those  making  such  use  of  the  grounds 
but  it  is  of  direct  value  to  the  school  in  keeping  it  promi- 
nently before  the  people.  When  the  people  of  a  country 
district  use  the  school  grounds  for  all  kinds  of  assemblies, 
baseball  games,  community  picnics,  farmers'  conferences, 
etc.,  the  school  becomes  an  institution  of  greater  importance, 
and  as  a  result  receives  better  support  both  moral  and  finan- 
cial than  it  does  otherwise. 

SUMMARY 

1.  The  site  should  be  dry  with  natural  drainage  if  possible,  preferably 

gravel  or  sandy-loam  soil,  but  should  be  near  a  source  of  supply 
of  water  for  drinking  and  other  purposes. 

2.  The  site  should  contain  from  10  to  25  acres  of  land  for  the  school 

building  and  surrounding  lawns,  the  principal's  cottage,  play- 
grounds, demonstration  plats  for  teaching  agriculture,  the  prin- 
cipal's garden,  and  the  farm. 

3.  The  buildings  should  be  placed  away  from  unpleasant  and  unde- 

sirable surroundings,  such  as  ill-smelling  barnyards  and  noisy 
traffic,  either  on  the  railroad  or  highway. 

4.  The  playground  should  be  ample  in  size  so  that  separate  parts  can 

be  assigned  to  the  younger  and  to  the  older  children.  Base- 
ball-fields, basket-ball  and  volley-ball  courts,  tennis-courts,  etc., 
should  be  provided.  The  playgrounds  should  be  used  by  all 
residents  of  the  community,  as  much  as  possible,  when  school  is 
not  in  session. 

5.  The  demonstration  plats  should  be  conducted  to  show  the  boys 

studying  agriculture  and  the  farmers  of  the  district  the  value  of 


164  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

scientific  cultivation,  of  various  kinds  of  treatment  of  soils,  of 
different  fertilizers,  and  of  new  varieties  of  farm  plants. 
6.  The  principal's  garden  and  the  farm  should  be  conducted  as  nearly 
as  a  model  as  possible.  In  order  that  this  may  be  done  the  prin- 
cipal should  be  a  man  with  agricultural  training;  he  should  be 
employed  for  twelve  months  in  the  year;  and  should  be  furnished 
a  cottage,  rent  free,  in  which  to  live. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  What  requisites  of  a  good  school  site  are  discussed  in  Dresslar's 

"Rural  Schoolhouses  and  Grounds,"  a  bulletin  of  the  U.  S. 
Bureau  of  Education? 

2.  Note  the  requirements  of  a  school  site  as  given  in  Ayres  and  Wood's 

"Healthful  Schools."    Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

3.  Judge  the  site  of  some  available  school  site  by  the  standards 

suggested.  Criticise  the  plan  for  a  complete  school  plant  given 
in  the  last  chapter. 

4.  Would  it  be  possible  to  rate  a  consolidated-school  site  on  a  score- 

card  as  buildings  can  now  be  rated,  each  point  receiving  a  score 
and  the  combined  scores  being  the  rating? 

5.  How  can  a  school  site  in  your  home  State  best  be  beautified? 

6.  What  suggestions  for  landscaping  a  school  site  are  made  in  bulletin 

form  by  your  State  department  of  education? 

7.  What  suggestions  along  these  lines  are  made  by  Dresslar  in  his 

bulletin  mentioned  above? 

8.  Describe  some  noteworthy  school-site  adornment,   as  given   by 

Kern  in  his  "Among  Rural  Schools"  (Ginn),  by  King  of  the 
University  of  Iowa  in  his  bulletin  on  "Hygienic  Conditions  in 
Iowa  Schools,"  or  some  other  writer  of  a  book  or  report. 

9.  What  do  the  school  surveys  usually  find  regarding  the  size,  charac- 

ter, equipment,  and  adornment  of  school  sites  (e.  g.,  the  Ohio 
School  Survey)  ? 
10.  What  can  pupils  and  parents  be  led  to  do  voluntarily  for  school- 
site  improvement? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Dresslar — "Rural  Schoolhouses  and  Grounds."     U.  S.  Govern- 

ment Printing  Office. 

2.  Challman— "The  Rural-School  Pant."    Bruce  Publishing  Co. 

3.  Rapeer — "Standardizing  the  Rural-School  Plant.*'    School  and 

Society  for  Feb.  13,  1915. 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  SITE  AND  ITS  USE      165 

4.  "Rural-School  Hygiene,"  a  survey.    (Section  of  the  Penn- 
sylvania Rural-School  Survey,  published  by  the  editor.) 

5.  Ayres,  Williams,  and  Wood — "Healthful  Schools."     Houghton 

Mifflin  Co. 

6.  Dresslar — "School  Hygiene."    Macmillan. 

7.  Rapeer — "Educational  Hygiene."    Scribner. 

8.  Kern — "Among  Country  Schools."     Ginn. 

9.  Arbor-day  and  special  bulletins  on  improvement  of  school  grounds, 

the  school  farm,  the  school  manse,  etc. 
10.  See  the  American  School  Board  Journal  (Milwaukee,  Wis.)  and 
the  American  Journal  of  School  Hygiene  (Worcester,  Mass.)  for 
occasional  suggestions  on  sites.  The  State  departments  of  ed- 
ucation of  a  number  of  States  issue  bulletins  dealing  with  the 
school  site. 


CHAPTER  IX 
THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  How  are  the  needs  and  conditions  of  a  consolidated  school  diflfer- 

ent  from  those  of  a  city  school? 

2.  What  differences  in  the  building  might  grow  out  of  adaptation  to 

the  needs  of  proper  transportation? 

3.  What  advantages  and  disadvantages  come  from  having  elemen- 

tary and  high-school  pupils  in  the  same  building  ? 

4.  What  adaptations  in  the  building  should  be  made  to  bring  a  maxi- 

mum of  advantages  and  a  minimum  of  disadvantages  where 
children  are  of  all  ages  from  six  to  eighteen? 

5.  Describe  the  best  school  auditorium  you  have  seen. 

6.  What  are  the  relative  advantages  of  one-story  and  two-story  school 

buildings  for  rural  education? 

7.  What  rating  would  you  give  a  four-room  school  building  with  no 

special  rooms  except  cloak-rooms,  standing  out  in  the  open  coun- 
try, as  a  consolidated  rural-school  building — first,  second,  third, 
fourth,  or  fifth,  on  a  five-point  score-card? 

I.     City  versus  Country  Buildings 

The  heart  of  the  consolidated-school  plant  is  the  build- 
ing. It  should  be  thoroughly  adapted  to  the  purposes  for 
which  consolidation  has  been  made.  It  should  be  neither 
a  city  school  set  down  in  the  country  or  village  trading 
centre  nor  a  building  of  the  traditional  type,  since  the  pur- 
poses of  these  are  so  different.  Less  scientifiic  thinking  and 
experimentation  have  been  carried  on  in  adapting  the  build- 
ing to  consolidation  than  to  any  other  feature.  Transporta- 
tion, teachers'  cottages,  barns,  the  curriculum  in  relation  to 
country  needs,  and  the  rural  school  as  a  community  centre, 
have  all  been  less  on  a  dead  level  of  mediocrity  than  the 
building.      Educators   have   introduced   or   developed   the 

166 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING  167 

former;  educators,  unfortunately,  too  frequently  have  little 
or  nothing  to  say  about  planning  and  constructing .  rural- 
school  buildings. 

A  man  who  has  built  a  few  barns  and  country  or  town 
houses  frequently  gets  the  contracts  for  architectural  plans 
and  construction.  He  knows  nothing  of  education  and  has 
never  heard  of  school  architecture  and  expert  school  archi- 
tects. Often  he  cannot  read  blue-prints  nor  follow  printed 
specifications.  Frequently  the  State  has  done  little  or  noth- 
ing to  standardize  and  suggest  good  plans  for  school  build- 
ings through  the  State  school  superintendent's  office,  al- 
though conditions  in  this  respect  are  changin^g.  The  school 
directors  blunder  along  in  the  dark  and  the  results  of  their 
blundering  stand  as  monuments  to  democratic  stupidity  at 
its  worse  for  fifty  years  or  more — woefully  unadapted  to 
country  educational  needs,  crippling  rural  schooling  at  the 
very  first,  and  growing  worse  each  year  with  the  progress  of 
educational  thought.  It  would  really  be  far  better  if  the 
school  building  could  be  constructed  fifty  years  in  advance 
of  educational  thinking  rather  than  fifty  to  a  hundred  years 
behind  it. 

To  be  sure,  there  are  a  growing  number  of  hopeful  ex- 
ceptions to  the  above  statements.  School  architects  who 
are  specialists  in  their  profession  are  becoming  every  day 
more  in  evidence.  State  laws  and  State  departments  of 
education  are  gaining  more  power  over  school-building 
operations;  and  a  number  of  excellent  examples  of  what 
consolidated  rural-school  buildings  should  be  are  in  evi- 
dence in  several  States.  The  national  government  is  also 
helping  in  schoolhouse  improvement,  and  a  great  many 
valuable  suggestions  are  being  brought  together  by  the 
National  Bureau  of  Education  and  other  organizations. 
Yet,  on  the  whole,  it  is  still  very  discouraging  to  look  over 
the  bulletins  on  school  architecture  prepared  by  most  States 
for  the  help  of  school  boards  and  note  the  poverty  of  con- 
structive ideas  in  evidence. 


1 68  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Contrasting  Consolidated  and  City  Buildings. — The 
differences  in  purposes  and  conditions  between  the  city  and 
the  consolidated  school  are  worth  noticing.  Frequently 
overlooked,  some  of  these  distinctions  which  must  be  kept 
in  mind  may  be  summarized  as  follows: 

1.  Land  is  more  plentiful  and  available  in  the  open 
country  or  adjacent  to  a  village  trading  centre.  The  build- 
ing may  spread  out  more  and  thus  obviate  the  necessity  of 
second  and  third  floors  and  basements  with  their  greater 
cost,  needless  stair-climbing,  and  sanitary  and  educational 
disadvantages.  A  one-story  building  with  no  basement 
and  no  part  below  ground  is  possible  in  the  country  and  is 
educationally  much  to  be  desired.  The  city  school  is  more 
or  less  of  a  monstrosity  because  it  has  had  to  adapt  itself 
to  too  small  a  site. 

2.  The  building  must  provide  for  growth  and  exten- 
sions. The  unit  building  plan  must  be  utilized  and  plans 
for  growth  to  the  fullest  consolidated  size  must  be  made  at 
the  outset.  The  one-story  building  makes  these  extensions 
rather  simple.  A  two  or  three  story  building  complete  at 
erection  is  an  architectural  bar  to  building  growth.  The 
consolidated  school  of  the  future  will  probably  be  but  one 
story  in  height. 

3.  The  rural-school  building  is  commonly  without  fire- 
fighting  departments  within  easy  call,  such  as  the  city  pro- 
vides, and  must  thus  be  constructed  with  particular  adap- 
tations to  the  fire  hazards.  Two  school  buildings  are  now 
burning  each  day  of  the  year.  In  the  Collinwood  fire,  in 
a  typical  two-story  building,  one  hundred  and  seventy-three 
children  burned  to  death  in  a  few  minutes.  The  one-story 
plan  is  desirable  here  and  this  should  be  as  completely  fire- 
proof and  panic-proof  as  possible.  One  row  of  rooms  with 
a  corridor  about  a  large  open  space,  and  constructed  largely 
of  concrete,  gives  a  good  type  of  fireproof  building. 

4.  No  city-water  or  lighting  systems  for  the  building  will 
usually  be  available  in  the  country  and  these  will  have  to  be 
supplied  within  the  building  itself  as  independent  systems. 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING  "169 

5.  Transportation  for  a  number  of  children  in  school- 
owned  automobiles  or  other  vehicles  and  in  private  vehicles 
of  all  kinds  will,  in  the  complete  consolidated  plant,  be  in 
operation.  The  building  should  be  adapted  to  the  loading 
and  unloading  of  children  in  such  a  way  as  to  prevent  ex- 
posure to  rain,  snow,  and  cold  winds.  Some  have  suggested 
that  the  building  should  be  constructed  with  an  arcade  in 
order  that  the  vehicles  might  drive  right  through  the  build- 
ing; but  usually  a  driveway  covered  with  a  wide  porch  on  a 
protected  side,  probably  the  south  or  east,  will  be  sufficient. 
Buildings  for  storing  the  vehicles  and  any  horses  or  other 
animals  used  will  also  be  necessary. 

6.  Modern  country  life  is  based  on  science,  largely  agri- 
cultural science  and  home  science.  AppHed  botany,  zo- 
ology, chemistry,  and  physics  will  be  central  subjects. 
These  subjects  require  proper  laboratories,  beginning  for 
the  pupils  at  least  with  the  fifth  or  sixth  grade.  These 
rooms  require  more  than  ordinary  planning  to  meet  country 
conditions.  The  old  classroom  in  which  country  children 
were  persecuted  with  studies  such  as  Latin,  Greek,  German, 
French,  algebra,  and  geometry  will  not  be  much  in  evidence. 
The  rooms  must  be  adapted  and  equipped  for  helping  coun- 
try people  solve  country  problems. 

7.  The  consolidated  building  serves  more  Junctions  for 
the  community  than  the  city  building.  There  is  practically 
no  institution  frequently  to  compete  with  it. 

8.  The  city  has  many  places  for  recreation  and  social 
meeting.  The  consolidated  school  is  the  only  centre  to 
which  the  whole  community  may  turn  for  community-centre 
activities.  The  churches  are  for  sections  of  the  people;  the 
school  is  for  all.  The  auditorium  is  central  in  such  a  build- 
ing. 

9.  Similarly,  the  city  has  fine  public  libraries  and  many 
easily  accessible  opportunities  for  reading.  The  consoli- 
dated-school library  for  the  entire  community  within  the 
transportation  area  is  essential.  Such  a  room  requires 
careful  planning. 


170  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

10.  The  consolidated  school  is  about  the  only  public 
building  in  the  open  country.  It  should  be  attractive  and 
dignified,  in  keeping  with  its  high  educational  and  social 
purposes.  Beautiful  grounds  and  suitable  architecture  are 
essential  for  this  central  civic  institution.  This  does  not 
mean  high  steeples,  Grecian  columns,  and  "gingerbread" 
decorations.  Most  rural-school  buildings  are  hideous.  It 
does  mean  simple  beauty  and  appropriateness. 

11.  In  the  city  the  high  school j  except  at  Gary,  Indiana, 
and  a  few  other  cities,  is  separated  from  the  elementary 
schools.  Some  cities  have  also  separate  buildings  for  the 
intermediate  and  junior  high-school  grades,  sixth  to  ninth, 
or  other  combination.  Manual  training  and  domestic 
science  are  frequently  given  at  central  points  in  the  city 
but  not  at  every  school.  Pupils  frequently  have  to  go  some 
distance  to  their  athletic  fields  or  school  gardens.  In  the 
country,  however,  all  these  features  can  and  should  be 
combined  in  one  school  plant.  High-school  and  elementary- 
school  pupils  are  housed  in  the  same  building.  All  other 
features  are  concentred,  consolidated.  The  laboratories, 
library,  shops,  and  grounds  can  be  used  early  in  the  ele- 
mentary school  as  they  are  in  the  Gary  system.  The  audi- 
torium will  be  used  by  all  for  all.  Each  group  can  help  the 
other.  The  school  life  of  the  child  may  be  kept  continuous 
rather  than  disparate.  Everything  must  be  adapted  to 
this  wider  use.  Along  this  line  the  consolidated  school  has 
a  unique  opportunity  to  work  out  experimentally  a  superior 
type  of  education  for  our  democracy.  The  Gary  plan  and 
school  plants  may  be  studied  with  profit  by  consolidated- 
school  leaders.  Being  in  the  city,  so  far,  the  Gary  type  of 
building  is  of  two  or  more  stories,  but  there  are  many  features 
used  by  all  the  children. 

12.  The  school  should  be  an  object-lesson  in  its  water, 
lighting,  and  toilet  systems,  and  in  its  landscaping  and  other 
features.  A  pressure- tank,  force-pump,  gas-engine,  or  elec- 
tric motor,  flush  toilets,  independent  lighting  system,  and 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING  I71 

other  modern  features  that  should  be  installed  on  our  farms, 
frequently  go  out  from  the  consolidated  school  to  the  home- 
steads by  the  contagion  of  example.  In  the  city  these  things 
are  taken  as  a  matter  of  course,  in  the  home  and  in  the 
school. 

13.  In  the  city,  too,  the  building  must  frequently  be 
located  without  reference  to  light,  noise,  wind  directions, 
etc.,  because  of  the  small  size  and  shape  of  the  building  lot 
available.  In  the  country  the  long  outsides  of  the  class- 
rooms can  be  made  to  face  the  east  and  the  west  and  thus 
obtain  desirable  sunlight  and  other  factors  and  avoid  the 
disadvantages  of  north  and  south  exposure.  In  the  South 
and  the  tropics  the  classrooms  can  be  placed  broadside  to- 
ward the  prevailing  winds,  such  as  the  trade  wind  in  the 
West  Indies.     Overhead  lighting  helps  solve  this  problem. 

14.  The  consolidated  school  is  a  year-round  plant  for  at 
least  the  younger  children  and  the  principal  and  his  family. 
The  building  must  be  adapted  to  summer  uses  and  must  be 
built  with  the  thought  in  mind  that  it  is  always  to  be  under 
the  watchful  eye  of  the  principal  of  the  school.  In  foreign 
countries  it  is  quite  common  for  the  home  of  the  principal 
to  be  in  the  school  building,  a  custom  growing  out  of  board- 
ing-school times  and  a  wider  use  of  the  principal  as  a  com- 
munity secretary  arid  leader.  The  one-story  building  with 
a  single  row  of  classrooms  flanked  by  a  corridor  meets  sum- 
mer conditions  admirably  because  it  is  so  open  to  the  breeze. 
Care  must  be  taken  not  to  get  the  auditorium  too  much 
closed  about  by  classrooms,  although  this  may  be  neces- 
sary in  cities. 

15.  The  building  must  be  as  inexpensive  financially  as 
possible.  Our  distribution  and  apportionment  of  the  bene- 
fits of  taxation  are  still  so  unequal  and  unjust  that  the 
locaKty  has  frequently  to  bear  more  than  it  should  of  the 
financial  burden.  Consequently,  money  comes  hard  and 
must  reach  as  far  as  possible.  High  roofs  and  fancy  dec- 
orations  may  well  give  way    to  more  room    for  library, 


172  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

auditorium,  laboratories,  teachers'  retiring-rooms,  etc.  The 
flat  roof  with  some  overhead  lighting,  not  omitting  plenty 
of  window  ventilation,  may  well  become  typical  of  the 
country  school — a  low,  flat  building  it  would  seem  to  many 
until  they  were  used  to  it  and  had  been  on  the  inside  and 
seen  its  educational  advantages.  However,  financial  sacri- 
fice on  the  part  of  a  community,  with  some  county  and 
State  aid  in  putting  up  a  first-class  building,  completely 
fireproof  and  thoroughly  adapted  to  rural-life  needs,  is  one 
as  worthy  as  any  to  be  made  in  this  life.  Many  communi- 
ties are  making  noble  sacrifices  and  are  reaping  almost 
immediately  the  full  rewards  of  such  sacrifices. 

1 6.  One  further  difference  may  be  noted  in  closing. 
The  consoHdated  school  with  possibly  but  one  row  of  class- 
rooms and  a  corridor,  or  even  with  two  and  a  corridor  be- 
tween, may  have  bilateral  or  trilateral  and  overhead  light-' 
ing,  and  thus  have  desirably  wider  and  shorter  classrooms. 
The  unilateral-lighting  fad  has  made  schoolrooms  too  long 
and  narrow  for  the  best  teaching. 

n.     General  Standards  Applied 

Thus  the  consolidated  rural-school  building  is  unique  and 
in  a  class  of  its  own,  requiring  its  own  architecture  and 
adaptations.  Certain  great  standards  that  govern  all  schools 
should  be  applied,  but  in  the  main  it  is  an  original  con- 
formity to  new  conditions  and  needs.  The  opportunity  for 
careful  experimentation  and  climatic  and  other  adaptations 
is  before  us  in  this  era  of  reconstruction.  Great  opportu- 
nities for  American  inventive  genius  are  bound  up  in  the 
consolidated-school  building. 

The  details  of  consolidated-schoolhouse  construction  can- 
not be  entered  into  in  this  volume.  The  theme  is  one 
fit  for  a  volume  by  itself.  The  writer  has  dealt  with  the 
matter  at  greater  length  elsewhere.^     Challman  has  dealt 

^In  "Educational  Hygiene,"  Scribner's  Sons.    See  also  the  last  chapter  in 
this  volume. 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING  1 73 

briefly  with  the  matter  in  his  volume  on  **The  Rural-School 
Plant"  and  in  bulletins  of  the  State  Department  of  Public 
Instruction  of  Minnesota.  *^  Healthful  Schools,"  by  Ayres, 
Williams,  and  Wood,  and  Dresslar's  *^  Rural  Schoolhouses 
and  Grounds"  and  "School  Hygiene"  are  suggestive. 
Betts  and  HalFs  "Better  Rural  Schools"  deals  with  the 
building  problem.  Most  valuable  are  the  actual  schools 
that  progressive  leaders  and  communities  are  constructing, 
such  as  the  Sargent  and  the  Jordan  schools  described  in 
this  volume.  The  various  plans  of  one-story  and  other 
buildings  appearing  almost  monthy  in  the  School  Board 
Journal  and  the  plans  to  be  published  in  the  large  bulletin 
on  rural-school  consolidation  by  the  Bureau  of  Education 
will  prove  helpful.  Some  of  the  advantages  of  the  one- 
story  type  of  building  are  given  in  our  final  chapter. 

Lighting  and  Orientation. — The  whole  problem  of  ven- 
tilation is  as  yet  unsolved.  Present  scientific  investigation 
has  about  proved  that  the  important  factors  in  good  and  bad 
ventilation  are  not  the  chemical  composition  of  the  air — rel- 
ative amounts  of  oxygen,  carbon  dioxide,  and  organic  mat- 
ters— so  much  as  its  relative  condition  as  regards  movement 
of  the  air,  temperature,  and  humidity.  Other  factors,  such 
as  relative  amount  of  exercise  of  the  occupants  of  a  room, 
their  physical  condition,  and  clothing  and  bathing,  enter  in. 
Ventilation  affects  the  heat-regulating  mechanism  of  the 
skin  rather  than  the  lungs.  Respiration  and  ventilation 
must  be  kept  separate.  Since  windows  are  also  wind-ows 
for  wind  as  well  as  light  to  enter,  the  problem  of  lighting  is 
inextricably  bound  up  with  ventilation,  except  in  those  as 
yet  largely  non-existent  schools  where  a  good  fan  system  of 
ventilation  is  in  operation  every  day  of  the  school  year. 

To  avoid  the  shadows  of  the  little  fists  of  right-handed 
pupils  on  their  writing,  and  for  other  reasons,  we  have  as  a 
standard  to-day  that  at  least  most  of  the  light  of  a  class- 
room should  enter  from  the  left  of  the  pupils  as  seated. 
Many  schools  have  all  the  light  of  a  room  enter  from  the 


174  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

left  and  a  number  of  educators  have  by  various  adminis- 
trative and  publicity  devices  enforced  the  standard.  But 
they  tend  to  overlook  the  ventilation  function  of  windows, 
or  assume  that  *'the  fans  will  be  running  all  the  year,"  or 
that  sufficient  movement  of  air  is  produced  by  opening 
windows  on  but  one  side  of  a  room.  Both  assumptions  are 
practically  universally  contrary  to  fact,  and  this  strict  uni- 
lateral-lighting fad  has  done  much  harm,  not  only  in  the 
tropics  where  Northern  schools  are  copied  but  everywhere  in 
our  own  country.  The  writer  has  dealt  with  the  problem 
more  at  length  in  "The  Case  Against  Unilateral  Lighting" 
in  the  School  Board  Journal  (Milwaukee,  Wisconsin)  for 
July,  1918,  and  "Summer  School  Sanitation"  in  The  Amer- 
ican Journal  of  School  Hygiene  (Worcester,  Massachusetts) 
for  June,  191 8.  The  ventilation  problem  was  dealt  with 
under  the  title  of  "Changing  Standards  of  Schoolhouse 
Ventilation"  in  the  first-named  journal  for  April,  19 19. 

In  order  to  give  each  regular  classroom  of  the  typical 
elementary  school  size  (about  24  to  25  by  30  to  32)  the  ad- 
vantages of  largely  left-hand  lighting  and  east  or  west* 
sunshine,  the  typical  building  is  coming  to  be  one  with  the 
longer  axis  running  north  and  south  with  a  corridor  be- 
tween the  two  rows  of  rooms.  In  the  West,  but  one  row  of 
rooms  with  a  long  porch  is  a  type.  For  hot  climates  the 
writer  has  advocated  one  or  two  rows  of  classrooms,  end  to 
end,  covered  by  a  single  roof  and  flanked  by  porches  on 
both  sides  and  the  whole  at  right  angles  to  the  prevailing 
winds.  A  single  row  of  rooms  is  better  than  two  rows  with 
a  hall  between,  for  several  reasons. 

High  windows  on  the  rear  and  right  of  the  pupils  we  be- 
lieve are  also  desirable.  These  windows,  about  the  size  of 
the  upper  sashes  on  the  left,  are  desirable  for  ventilation  if 
not  for  light.  Where  there  is  a  central  corridor  it  will  be 
very  much  better  lighted  by  this  system  than  by  the  uni- 
lateral-lighting plan.  Of  course  the  system  provides  cross- 
ventilation,  the  only  kind  possible  much  of  the  time,  the 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING  1 75 

breeze  going  entirely  through  the  building  across  the  cor- 
ridor. No  injurious  cross-lights  or  shadows  are  to  be  antici- 
pated by  this  plan.  As  suggested  above  and  later,  the 
classroom  may  be  wider  and  shorter  than  the  above  dimen- 
sions and  partly  lighted  from  above. 

The  windows  on  the  left  of  the  pupils  should  extend  from 
about  the  level  of  the  pupils'  eyes  entirely  to  the  ceiling.  A 
twelve  to  thirteen  foot  ceiling  is  high  enough.  These  win- 
dows, five  or  six  in  number  usually,  should  have  as  little 
space  between  them  as  possible  and  should  extend  from 
about  six  feet  from  the  front  of  the  classroom  entirely  to 
the  rear  of  the  room,  and  practically  as  a  single  window. 
Steel  muUions  instead  of  brick  piers  between  the  windows 
are  best  for  this  purpose.  In  some  schools  a  large  third 
sash  or  transom  is  used  to  get  a  full-length  window.  The 
sashes  should  usually  be  wide  and  with  single  panes  of  glass. 
The  steel  window  is  being  widely  used  to-day. 

The  single-sash  windows  on  the  rear  and  right  may  be 
about  as  close  together  as  those  on  the  left.  If  they  are  put 
on  hinges  at  the  rear  (if  opening  to  the  outer  air  instead  of 
into  another  classroom  or  cloak-room)  and  if  those  on  the 
right  are  on  pivots,  top  and  bottom,  these  windows  may  be 
easily  managed  even  if  above  the  blackboard  level,  as  they 
should  be.  In  very  hot  climates  or  in  rooms  used  for  summer 
classes,  ventilators  which  admit  air  but  not  light  (horizontal 
boards  set  at  an  angle  near  together)  may  well  be  put  in  for 
ventilation,  even  in  the  front  of  the  room. 

Overhead  lighting  may  be  utilized  to  good  advantage  in 
all  one-story  schools,  but  should  not  lead  to  fewer  or  closed 
windows  on  the  sides,  because  this  cuts  down  opportunity 
for  natural  ventilation,  the  only  economical  and  practi- 
cable kind  during  warm  weather. 

Shades. — The  best  shades  are  poor  indeed.  They  fre- 
quently obstruct  both  light  and  air.  The  ordinary  dark- 
green  shade,  which  has  become  so  common  because  of  the 
theory  that  "green  is  good  for  the  eyes,"  has  ruined  more 


176  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

eyes  than  it  has  helped,  by  making  rooms  dark  and  cave- 
like when  pulled  over  the  window  in  order  to  cut  off  the 
blinding  rays  of  the  sun.  This  color  should  practically 
never  be  used  except  for  stereopticon  purposes.  Light  tan 
is  a  much  better  color.  The  shade  should  be  translucent, 
letting  in  plenty  of  light  but  toning  down  the  intensity  of 
direct  rays.  Cloth  shades  are  probably  the  best  for  schools. 
The  folding-shade  has  the  disadvantage  of  cutting  out  light 
if  pulled  to  the  top  of  the  window,  since  it  can  be  folded  no 
narrower  than  about  a  foot  to  eighteen  inches  in  width. 
The  roller  cloth  shade  with  the  roller  hanging  by  a  single 
cord  from  the  middle  top  of  the  window  is  good.  The 
roller  cloth  shade  with  the  roller  attached  at  the  ends  to  a 
cross-stick  and  this  attached  by  a  cord  to  the  middle  top  of 
the  window  is  the  best  the  writer  has  seen  for  combining  a 
number  of  advantages  with  the  fewest  disadvantages. 

Various  hanging  slat  devices,  like  Venetian  blinds,  which 
are  supposed  to  admit  plenty  of  gentle  air-currents  and 
sunlight  and  to  keep  out  too  much  light,  wind,  and  rain,  are 
splendid  in  theory  but  usually  poor  in  operation.  Teachers 
must  be  trained  and  supervised  continually  to  keep  shades 
properly  adjusted  for  the  best  light  conditions  in  these  book- 
reading  school-days.  Defects  of  vision  increase  in  prac- 
tically every  school  upward  through  the  grades.  It  is  time 
that  this  crime  against  childhood  be  stopped. 

Workrooms,  libraries,  laboratories,  auditoriums,  and 
other  rooms  should  have  plenty  of  light  and  be  governed  by 
about  the  same  principles,  although  the  different  seating 
arrangements  may  make  north  or  south  light  satisfactory. 
Below-ground  rooms  should  not  be  tolerated  in  such  schools, 
not  even  two  or  three  feet  below  the  surface.  If  this  is 
avoided  the  lighting  problem  will  not  be  serious.  In  a  one- 
story  building  the  auditorium  and  gymnasium  wing  is  usually 
two  stories  in  height  and  semi-detached. 

Ventilation  and  Heating  Devices. — The  consolidated 
school  that  deserves  the  name  and  is  in  a  latitude  where 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING  1 77 

considerable  heat  must  be  furnished  during  the  winter  has 
a  central  heating-plant — vapor,  hot  water,  steam,  or  hot 
air.  The  first  three  require  a  separate  ventilating  device 
and  air-ducts  through  which  air  is  forced  by  a  fan  run  by 
steam,  gas,  or  electricity.  The  hot-air  furnace  alone  should 
not  be  relied  upon  entirely  in  cold  climates,  since  the  air 
must  be  overheated  and  made  too  dry.  Radiators  must  be 
used  also.  The  fan  system  is  by  far  the  best  ventilating 
system — fan  ventilation  and  the  temperature  of  the  in- 
coming air  kept  rather  cool  and  stimulating  and  hot-water, 
vapor,  or  steam  heating  in  classrooms.  There  is  great  danger 
of  overheating  the  air  in  the  fan-room,  thus  depriving  it  of 
moisture  and  the  stimulation  of  coolness.  Each  system  of 
this  kind  must  have  a  thorough  humidifying  arrangement, 
its  effect  being  to  aid  the  body  in  eliminating  excess  heat. 

The  air-washing  system  by  which  the  air  after  passing 
through  the  fan  is  forced  through  a  small  room  in  which 
there  is  a  shower  of  water  forced  out  of  brass  nozzles  in  a 
fine  spray  or  mist  is  necessary  for  humidifying  and  cleaning 
the  air.  In  such  a  building  the  outlet  ducts  should  be  con- 
nected with  the  inlet  ducts  to  permit  of  recirculation  of  air 
when  desired.  The  plan  has  not  been  tried  out  yet  to  any 
considerable  extent,  but  where  tried  saves  about  half  the 
coal,  takes  out  odors  of  the  air  from  classrooms,  puts  in 
moisture,  and  gives  the  three  great  essentials  of  ventilation: 
moisture  (about  50  to  70  per  cent  of  saturation  which  can 
easily  be  measured  by  a  simple  hair  hygrometer),  tempera- 
ture (about  65  to  68  degrees,  with  above-stated  humidity), 
and  movement  of  the  air  (not  drafts  but  perceptible  mo- 
tion). Changing  temperatures  are  more  stimulating  than  a 
steady  one.  Perkins  suggests  several  modifications  of  the 
usual  heating  and  ventilating  arrangements  for  one-story 
schools.  Vernon  suggests  others.  Some  schools  have  elec- 
tric fans  in  the  walls  of  each  classroom,  which  force  air 
through  radiators  into  the  rooms,  under  control  of  the 
teachers. 


178  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Some  schools  use  jacketed  stoves,  but  these  have  no 
place  in  a  real  consolidated  school.  Of  course  the  consoli- 
dated school  frequently  has  to  go  through  a  period  of  in- 
fancy in  which  the  school  is  small  because  of  incomplete 
consolidation  of  the  district,  a  small  but  growing  popula- 
tion, etc.  In  such  cases  these  stoves  may  be  used  but  are 
not  recommended  for  even  a  two-room  building.  Where 
there  is  a  furnace  for  a  central  system  and  several  rooms,  it 
should  usually  be  placed  in  a  detached  fireproof  building, 
not  in  a  basement.  The  small  heating-pla»t  behind  the 
school  building  is  best.  Of  course  a  good  janitor  and  man- 
of-all-work  will  be  provided  for  a  real  consolidated  school. 

III.     Rooms 

The  Classrooms. — The  standard  classrooms  are  the 
most  important  features  of  a  school  building  and  nothing 
should  be  permitted  to  interfere  with  them  in  planning  the 
architecture.  Frequently  an  architect  plans  the  outside  of 
a  building  with  respect  to  appearances  and  then  puts  rooms 
into  such  a  structure  wherever  he  can.  A  better  plan  is  to 
provide  the  desired  number  of  standard  classrooms  and  add 
such  high-school  rooms,  auditorium,  etc.,  as  are  desired,  and 
then  make  the  exterior  as  attractive  as  possible  consistent 
with  good  taste.    Standard  essentials  come  first. 

A  very  desirable  form  for  the  classroom  is  oblong  with 
a  cloak-room  at  the  front  end,  behind  the  teacher ^s  desk, 
where  she  may  supervise  it.  The  latter  may  be  six  to  eight 
feet  wide  and  have  two  doors  entering  the  classroom,  but 
none  opening  into  the  corridor  or  porch.  Perkins  has  an  in- 
teresting variation  as  shown  in  the  accompanying  plan  with 
cloak-room  at  the  rear.  It  leaves  more  blackboard  space  at 
the  front.  The  size  of  the  standard  classroom  is  about  24  by 
32 ;  but  if  the  right-hand  and  rear-lighting  plan  recommended 
here  is  used,  the  room  may  be  much  wider  and  need  not  be 
so  long.  In  fact,  for  even  interior  classrooms  with  the  usual 
twelve  to  fourteen  foot  hall  where  there  will  be  no  light 


THE   CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDENG 


179 


from  the  rear  unless  it  be  through  high  windows  on  both 
side  walls  of  the  cloak-room  of  another  classroom,  the  room 


Floor  plan  of  Holly  high  and  elementary  school,  Holly,  Mich.  For  the  con- 
solidated school  the  editor  recommends  two  spaces  about  the  width  of  a 
classroom,  or  wider,  between  the  two  long  corridors  and  the  assembly- 
room,  and  wide,  short  classrooms.  See  his  floor  plan  in  the  last  chapter. 
Perkins,  Fellows  &  Hamilton,  architects,  Chicago. 


may  be  about  square,  say  27  by  27.     This  is  an  advantage, 
since  most  teachers  divide  the  pupils  of  the  classroom  into 


l8o  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

two  sections,  right  and  left;  and  the  wider  room  makes 
each  class  group  more  compact  and  better  to  handle  for 
recitation  and  for  general  management  than  three  long 
rows  of  children  on  either  side.  A  classroom  seven  rows 
of  seats  wide  and  six  rows  long  is  better  than  its  opposite 
for  most  teachers  and  pupils.  The  personality  of  at  least 
the  ordinary  teacher  is  of  short  range.  The  farthermost 
*'big  boy"  should  be  well  within  the  magnetism  of  her  per- 
sonality. Overhead  lighting  plus  the  bilateral  or  trilateral 
lighting  here  advocated  makes  a  very  wide  classroom  pos- 
sible. In  fact,  the  customary  standard  dimensions  given  above 
(24  by  j2)  may  well  be  reversed  for  educational  purposes,  and 
no  less  light,  but  more  in  most  cases,  for  each  pupil  than  in 
the  "standard"  unilateral-lighting  plan  be  secured.  What 
the  best  width  is  we  do  not  attempt  to  say.  We  greatly  need 
first-class  experimental  study,  with  easily  modifiable  rooms 
and  types  of  porches,  on  these  problems.  See  last  chapter. 
The  seats  may  well  be  of  the  movable  kind  for  many  edu- 
cational and  hygienic  reasons.  Dresslar  offers  some  good 
standards  for  seating  in  Monroe's  "Cyclopedia  of  Educa- 
tion" (Macmillan).  The  writer  inchnes  strongly  to  mova- 
ble school  furniture  as  opposed  to  the  screwed-to-the-iloor 
variety.  The  blackboards  should  be  of  slate  and  prefera- 
bly four  feet  wide,  low  enough  for  the  pupils  and  high 
enough  for  the  teacher.  They  should  extend  around  three 
sides  of  the  room,  front,  between  the  cloak-room  doors, 
right  side,  and  rear.  The  ceilings  should  preferably  be 
white  and  the  walls  light  tan  or  cream  color  down  to  a  level 
with  the  bottom  of  the  blackboards,  and  dark  tan  or  buff 
below.  Other  combinations  that  provide  a  light  and  cheer- 
ful room  on  even  cloudy  days  are  possible.  The  floor  should 
be  of  hard  non-splintering  wood  and  double.  If  the  build- 
ing is  of  two  floors,  at  least  the  second-story  floor  should 
be  soundproofed  with  deadening  quilt  of  some  kind.  No 
platform  is  needed  in  the  modern  democratic  school.  Hard 
chalk  only  should  be  allowed.  A  large  window  should  light 
the  cloak-room.     Reference  to  some  of  the  best  books  on 


THE   CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDLNTG  l8l 

school  hygiene  should  be  made  in  planning  the  artificial 
lighting  of  schoolrooms.  Not  only  the  character  of  the 
light  but  the  placing  of  the  lights  is  important.  In  the 
high  school,  rooms  of  different  sizes  are  desirable,  and  the 
cloak-room  problem  may  be  solved  in  another  manner.  One 
of  the  best  ways  is  to  provide  a  steel  locker  for  each  pupil. 
^  Other  rooms. — A  complete  consolidated  school,  one  that 
has  grown  up  or  has  been  made  a  complete  plant  from  the 
start,  will  have  also  a  good  farm- carpentry  room,  a  forge 
and  auto-repair  room,  nature-study  and  agriculture  room, 
home-economics  room  and  lunch-room,  applied  chemistry 
and  physics  laboratories,  a  library,  an  assembly-room  and 
study  hall,  a  gymnasium,  a  teachers'  room  for  each  sex,  a 
principal's  office,  a  medical  supervision  and  retiring  room, 
and  suitable  classrooms  for  art  and  other  subjects  that  re- 
quire special  adaptation.  A  swimming  pool  has  been  found 
indispensable  in  rural  consolidated  schools  of  the  west. 

The  toilet-rooms  will,  of  course,  be  indoors  unless  water 
is  absolutely  unobtainable.  Even  then  chemical  closets  are 
better  than  the  abhorred  outdoor  privies.  Few  schools  will 
be  placed  in  such  locations  as  to  be  without  plenty  of  water. 
A  good  septic  tank,  or  cesspool,  with  a  force  pump  run  by 
a  motor  of  some  kind,  and  a  large  pressure- tank  easily  make 
modern  sanitary  toilets  in  most  regions  possible.  They 
must  also  be  placed  in  farm  homes  if  the  latter  are  to  be 
redeemed  from  constant  medieval  drudgery,  and  the  school 
must  lead  and  set  the  pace.  The  toilets  should  not  be  in 
basements.  There  should  be  no  basements,  remember. 
They  should  be  well  lighted  and  of  the  very  best.  A  good 
book  on  school  hygiene  which  covers  this  phase  of  sanita- 
tion acceptably,  such  as  Dresslar's  book  by  that  name, 
should  be  consulted.  Note  the  location  of  toilets  in  the 
accompanying  plans  and  the  last  chapter.  They  are  well 
placed  for  convenience,  separation  of  the  sexes,  future  ex- 
tensions of  the  building,  etc. 

These  rooms  cannot  be  too  well  lighted  and  adapted  to 
sanitary  requirements.     The  number  of  stools  and  urinals 


l82  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

and  their  arrangement  have  all  been  worked  out  carefully 
and  the  best  of  modern  help  is  none  too  good  here.  The 
old  outdoor  privy  must  be  banished.  It  is  only  the  incom- 
plete, unfinished  consolidated  school  that  has  this,  and  it 
is  questionable  whether  the  school  deserves  the  reputation 
of  a  consoHdated  school  with  such  pioneer  inconveniences. 
The  cost  of  first-class  outdoor  privies  with  concrete  wells 
and  septic  tanks,  such  as  are  described  in  Dresslar's  bulle- 
tin, '*  Rural  Schoolhouses  and  Grounds,"  for  both  sexes  is  a 
considerable  share  of  the  cost  of  an  indoor  water-system. 
The  principal  disadvantage  of  constructing  such  outdoor 
buildings  at  the  outset  of  consolidation,  aside  from  sanitary 
ones,  is  that  they  tend  to  prevent  the  installation  of  proper 
and  modern  facilities  when  the  building  is  enlarged. 

Such  privies,  if  found  inescapable,  should  be  models  for 
those  at  the  farms — absolutely  flyproof,  decent,  comfort- 
able, screened  by  vines  and  hedge  or  bushes,  and  protected 
from  vandalism.  Usually  such  buildings  at  single-room 
schools  cultivate  typhoid-spreading  habits,  since  frequently 
no  toilet-paper  is  furnished,  and  no  warm  water,  no  paper 
towels,  and  no  soap  are  available  to  make  cleanliness  and 
sanitation  habitual.  The  outdoor  toilet  is  far  below  mod- 
ern standards  for  even  the  single-room  school  and  the  best 
country  homes.  It  certainly  is  entirely  out  of  place  at  a 
consolidated  school.  The  modern  octuple  presses  of  our 
city  printing-plants  which  turn  out  a  hundred  thousand 
folded,  complete  newspapers  an  hour  are  not  associated  in 
the  same  building  with  the  hand-press  of  Benjamin  Frank- 
lin's time.  Such  presses  as  Franklin's  are  seen  to-day  only 
in  museums.  Yet  at  consolidated  schools  it  is  sometimes 
proposed  to  build  outdoor  toilets,  even  where  a  good  water- 
system  is  easily  available  and  there  is  no  danger  of  pipes 
freezing  at  night.  Up-to-date  business  scraps  outgrown 
machinery  and  plans.  The  business  of  education  in  a 
democracy  needs  a  large  scrap-heap.  Outdoor  privies 
should  be  scrapped  first.     Septic  tanks  and,  where  neces- 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING  183 

sary,  cesspools  are  as  much  beyond  the  outdoor  privy  as  is 
the  rotary  beyond  the  hand-press.     See  reference  12. 

The  assembly-room  is  the  centre  of  rural  community 
life  and  of  the  consolidated  school's  activities.  A  school 
that  does  not  come  together  daily,  or  at  least  two  or  three 
times  a  week,  is  hardly  a  school.  It  is  a  collection  of  sepa- 
rate rooms  of  pupils  and  teachers  that  cannot  well  be 
moulded  into  an  organized,  common-group  consciousness, 
with  a  strong  spirit  of  loyalty,  responsibility,  and  common 
purposes.  A  rural  community  that  does  not  meet  thus  at 
least  once  a  month  is  not  a  community.  It  is  a  largely  in- 
dividualistic collection  of  persons  living  in  the  same  region, 
unorganized  to  a  great  extent  and  perhaps  at  variance  with 
each  other. 

The  Gary  school  system  uses  the  auditorium  all  day 
long.  In  the  Froebel  and  Emerson  schools  at  Gary  the 
auditorium  is  a  fine  theatre  with  a  large  stage  in  each,  with 
motion-picture  apparatus,  etc.,  and  used  by  different  groups 
of  pupils  all  the  day  and  week.  The  uses  of  these  audi- 
toriums is  described  in  the  recent  survey  of  the  Gary  schools 
by  the  General  Education  Board  (New  York)  and  in  various 
bulletins  and  books  on  the  Gary  system.  But  the  expense 
of  such  a  room  in  the  country  is  justified  if  it  is  used  but 
three  half-hours  and  one  night  a  week.  In  a  one-story 
building  the  auditorium  can  have  a  ceiling  of  any  height 
and  can  thus  extend  well  above  the  classrooms  and  secure 
light,  ventilation,  and  assembly  space.  It  should  be  thor- 
oughly fireproof  and  easy  of  access  both  from  without  and 
within  the  building.  For  evening  use  it  should  be  so  ar- 
ranged as  to  make  possible  freedom  from  interference  with 
the  classrooms,  laboratories,  etc.  Usually  the  gymnasium 
may  be  in  the  same  wing  as  the  auditorium.  It  is  hard  to 
use  a  suitable  auditorium  as  a  gymnasium,  yet  it  may  be 
done  where  a  sacrifice  is  necessary. 

In  many  schools  this  room  can  be  utilized  as  a  study 
hall  and  in  some  cases  as  a  lunch-room.    In  small  buildings 


184  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

two  or  three  classrooms  may  be  thrown  together  by  movable 
partitions  into  one  assembly-room.  In  some  cases  movable 
school  desks  are  used,  and  in  others,  where  schools  are  still 
using  the  old  variety,  the  desks  are  screwed  to  strips  of 
wood  which  rest  on  the  floor.  Thus  three  or  four  or  more 
desks  can  be  pushed  out  of  the  way  to  give  room  for  chairs 
for  adults.  In  some  cases  a  space  under  a  permanent  stage 
is  arranged  for  storing  temporarily  small  desks  and  chairs. 
The  assembly-room  feature  deserves  a  special  bulletin  of 
the  government.  We  cannot  take  the  space  here  to  do  more 
than  mention  and  recommend  some  of  the  features  which 
help  to  make  the  consolidated  school  building  a  productive 
rural  educational  plant. 

in.     Good  Buildings  for  Different  Conditions 

Types  of  Buildings. — Remembering  that  a  consolidated- 
school  building  in  its  infancy  may  be  but  a  four-room  build- 
ing and  that  it  may  be  a  long  time  in  growing  up,  we  realize 
that  the  types  of  buildings  will  range  from  the  small  three- 
teacher  graded  school  with  few  rural-education  conveni- 
ences up  to  those  complete  plants  that  vie  in  cost  and  scope 
with  the  best  city  schools.  In  standardizing  consolidated 
schools  these  types  must  be  arranged  for.  Standards  for 
the  building  alone,  for  the  building  and  entire  site,  and  for 
the  building,  site,  teachers,  and  instruction  may  be  set  up 
and  promulgated  and  enforced.  Plans  for  several  different 
sizes  of  buildings  must  be  prepared.  All  must  be  devised 
with  reference  to  future  extensions,  both  of  classrooms  and 
of  the  other  features  suggested  above,  such  as  assembly- 
room,  gymnasium,  high-school  department,  with  labora- 
tories and  library,  agriculture  and  home-economics  rooms, 
indoor  toilets,  etc.  Plans  now  on  foot  would  place  the  post- 
office  in  many  schools  of  the  country  and  make  the  post- 
master not  only  a  community  secretary,  helping  the  school 
principal,  but  a  community  middleman  for  marketing  and 


L.E_E_.ffi-. 


|Lffl4 


An  attractive  building  and  site.     Room  at  ends  for  extensions  to  the 


A  neat  example  of  the  two-story  type  with  basement, 
provision  for  extensions 


Poor 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING  185 

purchasing  commodities.  Public  libraries  and  voting-rooms 
are  being  provided  in  many  city  schools. 

We  offer  herewith  some  plans  for  schools  of  different 
sizes  and  educational  scope.  It  is  recommended  that  wher- 
ever possible  the  taxing  and  transportation  area  be  made 
large  enough  at  first  to  make  possible  the  erection  of  not 
less  than  a  four-room  graded  school  with  auditorium,  hot- 
water  or  other  central  heat,  indoor  toilets  of  the  water- 
flush  type,  a  library,  home-economics  and  agriculture  rooms, 
and  a  teacher's  room.  To  insure  proper  care  of  the  build- 
ing and  the  full  utilization  and  care  of  the  plant,  not  less 
than  fifteen  acres  of  land  should  be  purchased  and  a  home 
for  the  principal  teacher,  preferably  a  man  with  a  family, 
provided.  Products  of  the  farm  should  be  at  the  princi- 
pal's disposal  to  add  to  his  income.  Transportation  should 
be  provided  in  school-owned  automobiles.  A  good  barn 
should  be  provided  for  housing  vehicles  and  animals.  This 
should  stand  as  the  minimum  consolidated-school  plant. 

Where  the  district  at  first  brings  in  only  pupils  for  two 
rooms,  the  other  two  classrooms  suggested  may  be  used  in 
place  of  the  agriculture  and  home-economics  rooms,  but 
there  are  serious  disadvantages  here.  The  equipment  may 
require  moving  later,  and  if  pupils  are  put  into  the  rooms 
as  regular  classes,  as  the  district  grows  in  size  and  perhaps 
in  population  there  may  be  no  extensions  provided  for  these 
most  necessary  features  of  rural  education  until  a  high 
school  is  needed.  There  will  also  be  other  types  of  build- 
ings of  three  kinds,  namely,  as  to  size,  climatic  variation, 
and  inventive  variation.  New  types  will  long  continue  to 
be  invented.  North  Dakota  and  Louisiana  will  have  con- 
siderable climatic  differences.  There  will  be  almost  as  many 
types  as  to  size  as  there  are  rooms  and  special  features. 
There  may  also  be  one-story,  one-story  and  basement,  two- 
story,  and  two-story  and  basement  types,  but  the  one-story 
type  should  be  kept  if  at  all  possible.  There  will  also  be 
types   as   to  materials  of  construction   and  cost.    These 


i86 


THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 


cannot  be  discussed.    A  further  statement  of  the  advan- 
tages of  the  one-story  building  will  be  found  in  the  last 


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%W— y  ]90UX  M  ruT 

This  is  an  elementary  school  devised  by  Perkins  for  a  town.    The  auditori- 
um-gymnasium seems  to  be  too  closely  surrounded  for  good  natural  ventilation. 

chapter.  Help  in  school  planning  can  usually  be  had  from 
the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education  and  from  the  State  depart- 
ments of  public  education  in  the  capital  cities.     No  consoli- 


1 88  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

dated  school  should  be  erected  without  the  full  approval  of 
the  State  department  mentioned,  and  this  should  have  in 
its  employ  a  school  hygienist  who  is  conversant  with  the 
details  of  consolidated-school  architecture  and  practical 
building  problems  in  the  State. 

Teachers  should  use  every  effort  to  secure  truly  educa- 
tional school  plants  and  rigid  supervision  and  inspection 
from  the  educational  point  of  view.  Most  so-called  con- 
solidated rural  schools  to-day  are  doomed  to  disappoint 
the  community  and  teachers  from  the  first  by  the  lack  of 
plant  and  equipment  suited  to  the  needs  of  the  problem. 
Something  may  be  reasonably  expected  from  consolidation 
only  when  we  have  real  consolidation.  We  can  thresh  grain 
with  a  flail  but  our  results  cannot  be  compared  with  those 
of  the  best  modern  threshing-machines.  Let  no  one  say 
consolidation  is  a  failure  until  he  knows  not  only  what  kind 
of  teachers  and  curricula  are  used  but  with  what  kind  of 
a  building  plant  they  are  either  helped  or  hindered.  The 
well-set-up  school  plant  contributes  to  the  spiritual  as  does 
the  well-set-up  body.    In  the  words  of  Browning: 

"And  soul  helps  not  body  more 
Than  body  helps  soul." 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  What    phases    of    the    consolidated    rural-school    building    need 

further  explanation  than  here  given? 

2.  Describe  in  detail  the  method  of  providing  a  satisfactory  water 

and  toilet  system  (including  drinking-fountains,  wash-bowls, 
swimming  pool,  and  sinks)  for  an  eight-room  consolidated 
school-building  provided  with  a  good  well. 

3.  Describe  in  detail  a  good  artificial  lighting  system,  preferably  elec- 

tric, for  such  a  school. 

4.  What  advantages  and  disadvantages  do  you  see  in  the  plan  of 

having  the  auditorium,  with  possibly  the  library  and  some  other 
special  rooms,  along  the  front  of  the  building,  and  with  the 
elementary  school  extending  back  from  one  end  and  the  high 
school  from  the  other  U  shape)  ?     See  final  chapter. 


THE  CONSOLIDATED-SCHOOL  BUILDING  1 89 

5.  Give  a  list  of  some  of  the  best  books  to  use  in  studying  consoli- 

dated rural-school  architecture. 

6.  What  educational  magazine  gives  most  attention  to  such  archi- 

tecture ? 

7.  What  are  the  arguments  for  and  against  a  lunch-room  in  such  a 

school?  Should  the  assembly-room  be  used  as  lunch-room  or 
library?    Why? 

8.  Should  the  gymnasium  and  assembly-room  be  combined  as  the 

same  room?  Can  they  be  combined  satisfactorily?  May  the 
floor  be  of  cement  or  composition  material  in  the  gymnasium 
and  halls? 

9.  Report  on  at  least  one  of  the  one-story  school  buildings  described 

and  illustrated  in  the  American  School  Board  Journal. 
10.  What  are  its  advantages  and  disadvantages  as  a  rural  consoli- 
dated school  ? 
Note  :  The  final  chapter  may  well  be  read  before  chapter  X. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Dresslar — "Rural    Schoolhouses    and    Grounds."     Government 

Printing  Office. 

2.  "School  Hygiene."     Macmillan. 

3.  Rapeer — "Educational  Hygiene."     Scribner. 

4.  "Standardizing    the    Rural-School    Plant."    School    and 

Society  for  February  13,  191 5. 

5.  Challman— "The  Rural  School  Plant."    Bruce  Publishing  Co. 

6.  Bulletins  on  school  architecture  and  on  consolidation  of  schools 

published  by  many  State  departments  of  education. 

7.  Ayres,  Williams,  and  Wood — "Healthful  Schools."     Houghton 

Mifflin  Co. 

8.  Sargent — "Rural  School  Improvement  in  Colorado."    Bulletin  of 

the  State  College  of  Agriculture,  Fort  Collins,  Colorado. 

9.  A  forthcoming  bulletin  on  consolidation  by  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of 

Education. 

10.  Arp — "Rural  Education  and  the  Consolidated  School."    World 

Book  Co. 

11.  Perkins,    D.    H.,    architect,    Chicago.     Pamphlets   on   one-story 

elementary  and  high  schools. 

12.  Lumsden,  L.  L. — "  Rural  Sanitation."    Public  Health  Bulletin  No. 

94,  of  the  U.  S,  Public  Health  Service,  and  published  by  the 
Government  Printing  Office,  Washington,  D.  C. 


CHAPTER  X 
THE  TEACHERAGE 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  are  the  principal  advantages  and  disadvantages  of  requiring 

teachers  to  board  with  any  who  will  keep  them? 

2.  What  retarding  influence,  if  any,  has  this  plan  had  on  rural  schools? 

3.  What  are  the  advantages  and  disadvantages  of  providing  a  teacher- 

age  for  the  principal  of  the  consolidated  school? 

4.  Why  should  the  principal  usually  be  a  married  man  who  is  em- 

ployed for  twelve  months  in  the  year? 

5.  What  is  the  argument  for  providing  school  homes  on  school  prop- 

erty for  the  other  teachers? 

6.  Do  you  know  of  any  instance  where  such  homes  have  been  pro- 

vided for  the  man-of -all-work  and  caretaker  of  the  school  also? 

I.     What  Country  Teachers  Need 

The  Present  Status  of  Rural  Teachers. — The  annual 
wage  of  teachers  is  so  far  below  a  professional  and  necessary 
salary,  not  only  in  war-times  and  periods  of  rapidly  advanc- 
ing prices,  but  at  all  times,  that  everything  must  be  done  to 
make  the  conditions  of  work  and  living  as  attractive  as 
possible.  The  community  must  get  together  and  obtain 
superior  teachers  at  whatever  cost  and  then  must  use  every 
device  possible  to  make  them  happy  in  their  work.  Good 
teachers  must  be  treated  as  honored  guests  in  the  neighbor- 
hood. All  gossip  and  petty,  injurious  talk  and  tattle  about 
them  must  be  rigidly  stamped  out.  Never  should  the  chil- 
dren be  allowed  to  hear  adverse  criticism  of  teachers  by 
parents  and  others.  Loyalty  to  those  who  are  trying  to  do  a 
noble  work,  easily  ruined,  should  be  the  watchword.  The 
building  and  grounds  should  be  made  as  inviting  and  at- 
tractive as  possible  not  only  for  the  children  but  for  the 

190 


THE  TEACHERAGE  19I 

teachers.  There  should  be  in  each  building  teachers'  rest- 
rooms  for  both  sexes,  furnished  in  a  homelike  way  with 
easy-chairs  and  other  comforts. 

Why  does  the  country  lose  its  best  teachers  to  the  city 
so  rapidly,  usually  after  they  have  served  their  apprentice- 
ship by  practising  on  country  children?  Simply  because 
the  country  has  been  so  blind  and  stingy  that  it  has  saved 
pennies  to  lose  dollars,  stinted  the  children  and  teachers  by 
a  parsimony  that  stopped  or  reversed  the  wheels  of  progress, 
employed  poor,  unprepared  teachers,  given  them  meagre 
and  unsatisfactory  accommodations,  and  then  wondered 
why  "city  folks"  always  get  ahead  of  "country  folks.''  The 
city  that  understands  the  problem  attracts  teachers  and 
the  country  must  do  the  same;  for  our  democracy  will  not 
be  "safe"  with  poor  country  teachers  and  superior  city 
teachers. 

The  Opportunity. — The  consolidated  school  furnishes  a 
rare  opportunity  to  provide  suitable  working  conditions. 
It  also  offers  more  promise  than  any  other  plan  for  the  pro- 
vision of  satisfactory  living  conditions.  The  consolidated 
school  can  provide  a  good  building  with  all  modern  con- 
veniences for  pupils  and  teachers,  can  give  teachers  good 
salaries  and  all  the  encouragement,  hospitality,  and  loyalty 
desirable,  and  still  fail  to  keep  good  teachers  year  after  year 
in  its  service.  In  European  countries  this  problem  has  been 
met  by  providing  homes  for  teachers,  or  at  least  a  home  for 
the  principal  and  his  family,  frequently  as  part  of  the  school 
building.  Many  of  the  early  schools  grew  out  of  the  church 
and  nearly  all  the  schools  for  the  upper  classes  were,  until 
recent  times,  boarding-schools,  institutions  to  which  people 
came  from  a  distance  and  remained  day  and  night  for  weeks 
or  months  at  a  time.  Frequently,  too,  the  only  church  of 
the  community  abroad  is  provided  for  under  the  same  roof 
as  the  school  and  teacher's  home. 

It  is  customary  in  France,  Germany,  and  elsewhere  to 
find  both  the  head  teacher  and  his  wife  employed  by  the 


192  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

government  to  manage  such  a  rural  social  centre  even  where 
the  pupils  come  daily  from  their  homes  to  the  school.  Where 
the  church  is  a  part  of  the  general  educational  institution 
the  district  is  usually  all  Catholic  or  all  Protestant,  and  the 
Protestants  are  of  but  one  sect,  say  Lutherans.  The  com- 
bined building  is  often  a  beautiful  rural  structure  with  a 
red-tiled  roof  showing  from  afar,  and  the  principal  is  usually 
almost,  if  not  quite,  as  important  a  man  in  the  church,  where 
he  is  frequently  chorister,  violin-player,  or  organist,  and 
teacher  of  ethics  and  religion  to  the  children.  Where  com- 
munities can  abolish  their  sectarian  differences,  usually 
petty,  if  not  actually  based  on  superstitions  long  since  dis- 
proved by  science,  why  would  it  not  be  a  good  thing  in  this 
country  to  connect  the  general  religious  work  of  a  community 
with  the  consolidated-school  centre  as  at  the  Sargent  school  ? 

Photographs  and  floor  plans  of  buildings  for  teachers' 
homes,  entirely  separate  from  the  schoolhouses,  in  the  Brit- 
ish Isles  show  an  attractive  architecture  characteristic  of 
modern  England,  and  a  consideration  for  teachers  as  highly 
important  government  officials  that  compels  admiration. 
It  seems  strange  that  in  this  country  we  should  have  to 
invent  the  idea  of  the  publicly  provided  teacher's  home  and 
have  it  grow  from  such  primitive  experiments  as  were  carried 
on  near  Walla  Walla  in  the  State  of  Washington  in  the  year 
1905.  Many  schools  connected  with  churches  as  private 
ventures  in  our  own  country  were  long  before  this  provided 
with  a  parsonage  or  teacherage  for  the  teacher. 

In  the  experiment  at  Walla  Walla,  which  seems  to  be  a 
typical,  if  not  the  first,  instance  of  the  kind,  the  teacher  for 
whom  a  home  was  provided  was  a  public-school  teacher. 
Unable  to  obtain  board  and  room  at  the  home  of  the  only 
family  that  had  been  prepared  and  willing  in  the  past  to 
give  teachers  lodging,  because  the  people  had  "moved  to 
town  to  educate  their  children,"  this  teacher  made  the  as- 
sociation between  an  old  cook-wagon  she  had  noticed  on  a 
visit  to  the  school  community  and  a  place  in  which  to  live. 


^  Doable  Cottage 
S«c(Mtd  floor 

A  good  type  of  teacherage 


194  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

She  secured  the  wagon  and  in  company  with  a  small  brother 
lived  all  year  in  this  makeshift  ''kitchenette  apartment." 
Rain  and  cold  assailed  it  and  conditions  were  far  from  pleas- 
ant much  of  the  time;  but  this  hypothesis  led  the  next 
summer  to  the  construction  of  a  neat  two-room  cottage  in 
which  this  teacher  lived  two  more  years,  when  she  went 
away  to  complete  her  schooling  at  college.  Since  then  the 
teacherage  movement  has  grown  in  Washington,  and  other 
States  have  provided  "teachers'  cottages,"  until,  at  this  writ- 
ing, there  are  several  thousand,  both  in  connection  with  small 
one  to  three-room  schools  and  with  consolidated  ones.  The 
teacherage  is  highly  desirable  in  many  communities,  but  with 
the  consolidated  schools,  especially  those  situated  in  the 
open  country,  it  is  indispensable  to  real  consolidation. 

II.    The  Reasons  Why 

The  arguments  for  the  provision  of  one  or  more  teacher- 
ages  at  the  consolidated  school  may  be  abbreviated  as  follows: 

I.  Dignity  and  Independence. — Persons  who  must  de- 
pend upon  the  hospitality  of  others  in  limited  circum- 
stances cannot  obtain  the  freedom  and  dignity  necessary 
to  a  great  profession.  The  teacher  must  have  the  home  of  a 
teacher,  which  must  contain  among  other  things  a  room  for 
quiet  study,  with  books,  magazines,  possibly  a  typewriter 
and  duplicating  machine  of  some  kind  (if  only  a  hecto- 
graph); and  further  than  this  the  teacher  himself  must 
be  able  to  secure  there  certain  periods  of  freedom  from  in- 
terruption, such  as  the  life  of  scholarship  and  professional 
service  necessitates.  The  teachers  who  are  compelled  to 
live  as  boarders  in  the  homes  of  the  people  sometimes  have 
very  desirable  surroundings  and  study  conditions  conveni- 
ent to  the  school,  and  frequently  they  learn  much  of  the 
intimate  life  of  their  people  that  it  is  well  that  they  should 
know.  Yet  this  is  not  a  stable,  independent  existence,  such 
as  could  be  obtained  when  the  principal  and  faculty  live  in 
suitable  homes  provided  by  the  school.     Frequently  the 


THE   TEACHERAGE  I95 

differences  in  standards  of  living  of  the  farmer's  family  and 
the  teacher  lead  to  friction  and  misunderstanding.  In 
order  to  do  really  professional  work  and  hold  up  high 
standards  the  teacher  should  be  enabled  to  develop  well  his 
own  powers,  support  himself  in  dignity,  and  lead  a  self- 
respecting,  superior  life.  The  school  home  as  a  regular 
part  of  the  educational  plant  helps  to  give  the  respectability 
of  a  definite  social  status  in  the  community.  The  physician, 
the  lawyer,  the  pastor,  all  have  their  homes.  In  the  federal 
government  service,  wherever  it  is,  and  especially  in  for- 
eign countries,  where  it  is  hard  to  get  satisfactory  living 
conditions  such  homes  are  furnished  to  many  officials. 
England  and  the  United  States  have  entered  into  a  great 
development  not  only  of  single  dwellings  for  government 
workers,  but  even  of  entire  cities,  well  laid  out  and  attrac- 
tively constructed,  and  these  are  for  both  clerical  workers 
and  other  employees  in  munition  factories.  Wholesale  strikes 
occurred  or  threatened  at  first  at  many  great  government 
plants  because  of  impossible  housing  conditions.  Since  the 
erection  of  such  cities  the  workers  have  been  enabled  to 
live  peacefully,  happily,  and  decently  in  their  homes,  as 
they  should.  No  silly  cries  of  paternalism,  socialism,  or 
other  arguments  have  retarded  these  democratic  govern- 
ments in  such  developments.  The  other  government 
workers  of  the  country  must  have  standard  living  conditions 
also,  and  everything  in  and  about  their  homes  must  likewise 
contribute  to  happiness,  dignity,  self-respect,  and  indepen- 
dence. The  several  admirable  homes  at  the  consolidated 
school  at  Franklin,  New  Jersey,  are  as  much  or  more  needed 
in  our  public  consolidated  rural  schools  managed  by  the 
government  as  in  other  important  public  work.  They  lift 
the  profession  to  a  higher  standard. 

2.  //  Makes  Possible  a  Fair  Salary. — The  first  essential 
in  improved  rural  education  as  clearly  demonstrated  in 
former  chapters  is  a  salary  commensurate  with  both  the 
cost  of  living  and  high  types  of  principal  and  teachers. 


196  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Many  factors  contribute  to  make  the  annual  salary  of 
country  teachers  far  below  what  is  necessary  to  procure 
professional  educators.  A  small  money  salary  in  the  coun- 
try seems  larger  by  far  than  it  actually  is,  since  farmers  get 
their  annual  salaries  in  other  forms  than  money,  such  as 
house  rent,  fuel,  food,  transportation,  and  other  factors  of 
living.  They  handle  less  money  by  far  than  that  which 
represents  their  entire  living  and  income.  Thus  they  come 
to  regard  a  small  salary  as  a  big  outlay.  The  homes  for 
principals  and  teachers  can  be  built  at  the  consolidated 
school  as  part  of  the  initial  outlay  for  the  school  plant,  and 
the  difference  in  the  total  outlay,  in  bonds  or  otherwise,  is 
not  large.  A  thirty  to  sixty  thousand  dollar  outlay  is  little 
increased  by  three  to  ten  thousand  dollars  for  teachers' 
dwellings.  When  erected,  however,  they,  like  the  school- 
farm,  provide  a  definite  part  of  the  annual  income  for  the 
schoolmaster  that  lays  little  burden  on  the  community  and 
dispenses  with  much  of  the  psychological  agony  which 
would  annually  attend  the  problem  of  paying  a  fair  and 
sufficient  salary,  including  house  and  farm  rent.  Just  as 
the  church  with  a  parsonage  is  relieved  of  much  struggle  in 
money-getting  and  can  procure  better  pastors,  so  the  school 
will  find  itself  at  an  advantage  in  obtaining  good  teachers 
if  house  and  farm  rent  can  be  included  with  a  fair  salary. 
The  city  will  then  lose  some  of  its  advantage  as  it  does  now 
in  those  counties  where  country  teachers  get  from  five  to  ten 
dollars  more  a  month  than  town  teachers. 

3.  Good  Boarding  Places  Are  Hard  to  Find  in  Many 
Rural  Communities. — The  location  of  the  new  type  of  con- 
solidated school  must  be  determined  scientifically  in  full 
consideration  of  many  factors.  It  may  be  in  the  open 
country.  A  village  may  in  time  grow  up  about  it;  but  at 
the  time  of  erection  no  convenient  boarding  places  are  avail- 
able. The  large  and  relatively  expensive  building  and 
grounds  need  the  solicitous  care  of  one  or  more  schoolmen. 
An  ordinary  caretaker  is  insufficient.    In  the  open  country, 


THE  TEACHERAGE  1 97 

as  at  Franklin,  New  Jersey,  tjie  only  thing  to  do  is  to  pro- 
vide homes,  even  if  they  must  be  erected  by  a  private 
building  company,  receiving  a  long  lease  from  the  school 
board.  At  other  times  there  may  be  several  convenient 
homes  but  no  satisfactory  accommodations.  In  many 
places  the  landowner  has  moved  off  his  farm  and  has  ''gone 
to  town  to  educate  his  children,''  and  the  old  farmhouse 
has  either  run  down  or  a  new  and  much  smaller  renter's 
house  has  been  built.  Tenantry  management  does  not  pro- 
vide the  type  of  household  of  the  old  days.  In  other  cases 
the  distances  to  the  homes  are  too  great,  and  while  teachers 
might  ride  long  distances  each  day  in  the  school  hacks  or 
busses,  this  would  be  unsatisfactory  and  undignified  com- 
pared with  a  government  home  on  the  school  property. 

In  the  reports  of  State  superintendents  of  public  in- 
struction and  in  the  several  pamphlets  published  on  the 
school  manse,  the  teacher's  cottage,  or  whatever  it  is  called, 
there  are  many  dark  pictures  painted  of  the  unsatisfactory 
conditions  of  boarding  out  in  the  homes  of  the  pupils  or 
others  of  the  district.  Frequently  teachers  resign  because 
of  the  impossible  living  conditions  to  which  they  must  sub- 
mit. The  people  of  this  country  are  to  be  commended  for 
their  hospitality  and  care  of  teachers  in  their  homes.  They 
have  usually  given  them  the  best  they  have.  In  former 
days  they  even  "boarded  the  teacher  'round,"  as  described 
in  ''The  Hoosier  Schoolmaster,"  by  Eggleston.  But  coun- 
try life  is  changing;  the  teachers  are  changing  in  their 
standards  and  ideals  and  standards  of  living;  and  the  de- 
mands of  the  times  are  increasing.  Without  painting  the 
black  picture  of  how  much  below  the  right  living  standard 
for  the  country  many  teachers  are  compelled  to  live,  when 
their  domiciles  should  instead  be  fine  examples  of  what  is 
possible,  we  leave  this  argument  with  only  a  mention  of 
some  of  the  sources  of  dissatisfaction  with  the  boarding 
place:  the  poorly  chosen  food  unsuited  to  brain- workers  and 
perhaps  to  any  workers,  poor  cooking  of  the  food  furnished, 


198  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

uncultured  people,  no  room  in  which  to  study,  and  no  pri- 
vacy, no  opportunity  to  entertain  friends,  the  necessity  of 
regulating  hours  of  eating,  rising,  and  going  to  bed  by  those 
of  the  farm  instead  of  by  those  of  school  Hfe,  etc.  Where 
the  consolidated  school  is  located  in  a  trading  centre  village 
or  adjoining  one  the  problem  is  not  so  great,  but  many  con- 
siderations still  point  to  the  advisability  of  considering  as  a 
necessary  part  of  the  school  plant  the  homes  of  the  teachers. 
4.  The  Teacherage  as  an  Example. — The  teacherage  pro- 
vides a  possible  example  of  a  good  country  home.  We  have 
experimental  and  demonstration  farms  and  stations  in  many 
sections  of  the  United  States  and  we  need  them  in  every 
rural  community.  The  consolidated  school  and  home  must 
have  a  modern  water-supply  system  from  springs,  wells,  or 
cisterns  and  supplied  by  gravity,  pressure-tank,  engine- 
pump,  or  other  method.  This  home  should  be  a  model  in 
kitchen,  bathroom,  outdoor,  and  barn  conveniences.  The 
architecture  of  the  home  should  set  a  standard  for  the  com- 
munity and  should  be  adapted  strictly  to  local  conditions. 
It  is  hardly  possible  that  a  cottage  for  Arizona,  Florida, 
California,  Missouri,  Maine,  and  Montana  should  be  the 
same.  A  good  plan  for  one  region  might  be  a  poor  one  for 
another.  Of  course,  the  home  must  be  for  a  schoolman's 
purpose  as  well  as  for  a  farm-home  example.  Where  a  farm 
is  provided  the  home  can  be  a  real  farmhouse.  Otherwise 
numerous  compromises  must  be  made  between  adaptation 
to  school  and  farm  uses.  The  home-economics  depart- 
ment of  the  school  must  always  find  the  cottage  a  good 
place  for  demonstration  of  modern  domestic  science  and 
art.  Any  one  who  has  seen  farmers^  wives  tramp  through 
such  a  school  home  on  opening  day  by  the  hour  and  any 
one  who  has  seen  the  daily  demonstrations  of  modern 
planning,  decoration,  and  home-management  devices  in 
these  schools,  either  established  independently  or  partially 
endowed  by  the  General  Education  Board,  will  realize  the 
important  function  of  the  school-farm  home  as  a  demon- 


THE  TEACHERAGE 


199 


stration  and  domestic  experiment  station.    The  home  is 
justified  on  these  grounds  alone. 


"^"^'-""V^^  ^/^ 


An  Artistic 
WeU«ArraBged, 
and    8ubttantt« 
■lly^Built  P*nn  ^^ 

Residence  of      "   ^^ 
Moderau   Cost 


CASEMeNT  Plan 


TMCUMN  THOONI,  TULM,  ClOA* 


riast>>ru}OP  Plan 


Artistic  home  for  the  progressive  farmer.    Teacherages  lead  to  such  homes 
by  the  force  of  example 

5.  Full-Year  Service. — The  home  helps  to  make  possible 
year-round  service.    Former  chapters  have  emphasized  the 


200  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

desirability  of  service  for  twelve  instead  of  from  three  to 
ten  months  a  year.  Home  projects  must  be  carried  out 
largely  in  the  summer,  a  costly  school  plant  requires  care 
in  summer  as  in  winter,  the  people  need  their  meetings  and 
recreation  at  the  school  centre  as  in  winter.  The  principal 
should  be  at  work  on  his  own  school-farm  and  should  be  in 
intimate  connection  with  the  work  of  the  county  agent,  the 
teacher  of  agriculture,  the  experiment-station  workers,  and 
other  experts  on  farm  problems.  Moreover,  teachers  have 
to  eat  and  meet  the  high  cost  of  living  just  as  other  people 
do  in  summer  as  well  as  in  winter.  When  we  get  year- 
round  workers  and  year-round  salaries  we  may  hope  to  get 
into  rural-school  work  permanent,  skilled  workers  who,  as 
the  years  go  by,  can  be  of  increasing  service  both  winter 
and  summer.  The  varied  work  that  has  been  done  in 
summer  projects  in  Cook  County,  Illinois,  and  other 
places  is  suggestive  of  increased  developments  of  this  kind 
in  the  future.  The  consolidated  school  is  a  year-round  in- 
stitution with  its  work  closely  related  to  the  needs  of  the 
people  at  all  seasons  of  the  year.  The  teacher's  cottage 
makes  it  easy  for  the  community  to  retain  expert  services 
in  educational  leadership  twelve  months  in  the  year.  Vaca- 
tions can,  of  course,  be  more  easily  provided  for  teachers 
and  principals  when  most  convenient  for  the  community. 

6.  The  Elimination  of  Gossip. — The  school  home  helps 
eliminate  gossip  and  small  talk  about  teachers  that  fre- 
quently arises  when  they  are  scattered  about  among  the 
homes  of  the  community.  The  teachers  are  supposed  to  be 
an  educated,  cultured,  honorable  group  of  people,  living  up 
to  high  standards  and  free  from  many  of  the  artificial  re- 
strictions and  customs  inherited  from  previous  times  in- 
tended to  hedge  about  and  to  guard  relatively  ignorant  and 
uncultured  youth  and  older  people.  The  college  or  normal 
school  graduate  would  like  to  live  a  life  where  he  can  apply 
himself  with  whole-souled  devotion  to  his  task,  free  from 
the  danger  of  gossip  which  constantly  threatens  teachers 


THE  TEACHERAGE  20I 

ana  other  put)lic  officials.  The  one,  two,  three,  or  more 
homes  on  the  school  campus  provide  a  place  somewhat  re- 
moved from  this  menace  and  irritation  caused  by  differ- 
ences in  standards  and  occupations.  The  present  term  of 
service  of  rural  teachers  in  one  school  is  very  short,  Kttle 
over  one  school  year.  Gossip  on  the  part  of  patrons,  teach- 
ers, and  others  is  one  of  the  chief  reasons  given  for  moving 
on.  A  degree  of  seclusion,  professional  association  with 
other  members  of  his  craft,  and  abihty  to  live  a  life  accord- 
ing to  his  own  standards,  yet  with  full  respect  for  and 
deference  to  country  standards,  will  help  save  many  a  teacher 
for  a  number  of  years  of  service  to  the  community.  The 
typical  rural  teacher  to-day  is,  unfortunately,  a  young  girl, 
a  novice  in  the  service,  with  barely  a  high-school  education, 
who  will  stay  in  the  work  but  two  to  four  years.  Half  of 
the  more  than  two  hundred  thousand  rural  teachers  have 
not  so  much  as  a  high-school  schooling,  and  the  whole  stand- 
ard of  what  the  rural  educator  must  be  is,  therefore,  ludi- 
crously low.  No  other  business  in  the  world  would  succeed 
on  such  a  basis.  The  standards  for  public-school  service 
should  be  at  least  equal  to  those  of  banking,  grocery,  and 
drug-store  work,  and  farming  itself.  Young  girls  in  their 
teens  cannot  be  typical  of  public-school  workers,  neither 
can  immature  young  men,  or  older  men  who  may  know 
farming  but  not  the  teaching  profession.  Married  men 
with  families  in  any  business  make  possible  a  solid  founda- 
tion of  first-class  service  and  lasting  efficiency.  The  condi- 
tions of  living  in  the  teaching  profession  must  be  adapted 
to  make  possible  a  settling  down  in  the  work  on  a  perma- 
nent, life-work  basis.  The  home  for  the  principal  and  his 
family  promotes  this  elevation  of  the  profession,  and  of 
course  other  cottages  can  be  provided,  as  they  now  are  in 
some  places,  for  other  married  teachers.  Marriage  here 
between  teachers  need  not  mean  their  elimination  from  the 
profession.  The  teachers'  home  or  homes  for  unmarried 
teachers  of  each  sex,  with  long  terms  of  service,  naturally 


202  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

promote  that  acquaintanceship  that  leads  to  marriage, 
which  is  rather  to  be  encouraged,  as  it  is  abroad,  than  con- 
demned by  the  community.  The  teacher  is  to  become  a 
normal  adult  member  of  the  community  in  which  he  lives, 
broadly  socially  efficient,  not  a  transient  young  celibate 
employed  at  a  servant's  wage  for  a  short  time.  The  con- 
solidated-school home  is  the  best  means  yet  devised  for 
promoting  this  noxinality  and  efficiency  of  living.  That 
such  homes  can  be  provided  for  other  workers,  such  as 
janitors  and  drivers  of  school  hacks  or  motor-busses,  goes 
without  saying.  In  some  cases  old  school  buildings  can  be 
utilized  and  remodelled;  in  others  the  boys  in  farm  car- 
pentry can  build  one  or  more  cottages;  in  other  instances 
building  companies  may  be  given  land  leases  and  permitted 
to  charge  rents;  and  in  others  the  school  board  may  erect 
the  cottages,  as  in  most  cases  they  should. 

8.  Easy  to  Obtain. — The  cottages  are  not  as  difficult  to 
obtain  as  may  be  imagined.  As  suggested  above,  the 
needed  increase  in  the  bond  issue  or  tax  levy  to  secure  cot- 
tages in  a  community  possessing  upward  of  a  half  million 
dollars  in  taxable  wealth  is  not  great.  Outside  companies, 
or  student  or  adult  volunteer  labor  may  be  utilized.  I  have 
seen  admirable  concrete,  wood,  and  brick  structures  put  up 
by  students  of  no  higher  grade  than  those  attending  a  con- 
solidated school.  Frequently  old  schools  may  be  utilized 
in  one  way  or  another,  and  sometimes  the  land  obtained  as 
a  site  may  have  on  it  an  old  rural  home  and  outbuildings. 
When  the  national  and  the  State  governments  come  to  the 
rescue  of  public  education  for  such  features  with  large  fi- 
nancial appropriations,  as  they  must  (and  are  now  coming 
for  vocational  education),  a  large  share  of  the  cost  of  such 
homes  may  be  borne  by  the  people  generally.  Education 
to-day  is  a  national  as  well  as  a  State  function. 

9.  A  Visiting  and  Social  Centre. — The  teacher *s  cottage 
may  be  made  a  dehghtful  visiting  and  social  centre  apart 
from  the  school  itself.     When  the  teacher  is  either  a  boarder 


THE   TEACHERAGE  203 

or  comes  into  the  district  from  a  city  each  Monday  and 
leaves  promptly  each  Friday  afternoon,  there  is  hardly  any 
family  visiting  with  the  teacher.  Such  contact  is  the  prin- 
cipal bond  of  sociability  in  rural  regions,  and  when  the 
school  teachers  are  cut  off  from  it,  a  chasm  exists  between 
the  "school  people"  and  the  "country  people."  We  have 
read  a  number  of  interesting  accounts  of  how  teachers'  cot- 
tages, even  in  connection  with  single-room  schools,  have 
been  used  to  bring  young  and  old  together  occasionally  in 
small  groups  and  thus  closely  bind  the  school  to  the  life  of 
the  community.  One  principal  reported  that  twice  during 
the  year  his  family  had  entertained  the  pupils  of  the  high 
school  and  eighth  grade,  including  some  young  people  not 
members  of  the  school.  He  could  not  have  afforded  to  do 
this  entertaining,  he  said,  if  he  had  been  required  to  pay 
rent  in  a  private  dwelling.  Pupils  and  parents  drop  in  occa- 
sionally at  such  a  cottage  for  a  social  visit,  to  play  and  sing 
the  good  old  community  songs  at  the  piano,  and  to  meet 
the  teacher  on  the  familiar  footing  of  a  man  rather  than  a 
schoolman.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  this  simple  social 
function  of  the  consolidated-school  home  is  of  prime  im- 
portance to  the  success  of  the  institution  as  a  rural  edu- 
cational force. 

10.  ^  Happy  Life. — Finally,  the  school  home  helps  to 
make  the  teachers  happy  in  their  work.  A  group  of  like- 
minded  people,  highly  trained,  and  at  work  in  a  nerve- 
straining  profession,  can  become  either  very  miserable  or 
very  happy.  It  is  the  duty  of  the  rural-school  boards  to 
provide  for  the  happiness  of  their  workers,  since  they  thereby 
increase  greatly  the  efficiency  of  the  work  which  they  do. 
Social  happiness  is  the  goal  of  life  for  teachers  as  well  as 
farmers.  If  a  small  addition  to  the  general  cost  of  the 
consolidated-school  plant  will  add  greatly  to  the  happiness 
of  the  teachers  and  their  famihes,  giving  them  a  settled, 
dignified  social  position  in  the  community  where  they  can 
live,  teach,  farm,  and  rear  their  families  in  ease  of  mind  and 


204  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

with  reasonable  comfort,  farmers  will  not  deny  their  most 
important  officials  the  right  to  life,  liberty,  and  the  pur- 
suit of  happiness  which  they  claim  as  their  own.  Those 
who  have  most  to  do  with  the  very  characters,  lives,  future 
happiness  and  ability  to  promote  social  happiness  through 
social  service,  of  their  boys  and  girls,  the  progressive  country 
family  will  support  in  their  effort  to  perform  this  service 
well. 

In  general  summary,  the  ten  arguments  settle  the  claims 
for  the  school  home  as  a  regular  part  of  the  consolidated 
rural-school  plant,  and  meet  the  objections  which  some 
may  bring  against  it. 

III.    The  Prospects  Good 

Doctor  George  E.  Vincent,  President  of  the  General 
Education  Board,  New  York,  formerly  President  of  the 
University  of  Minnesota,  reports  as  follows  on  the  teacher- 
age: 

A  teacher's  house  or  school  manse  is  peculiarly  necessary  to  the 
success  of  the  consolidated  rural  school,  which,  it  is  now  agreed,  is 
to  be  the  typical  country  school  of  the  future.  There  should  be  built, 
in  connection  with  the  consolidated  school,  on  the  same  grounds 
with  the  school  building  and  heated  by  the  same  plant,  a  permanent 
house  for  the  use  of  the  teaching  staff.  This  building  should  con- 
tain a  wholly  separate  apartment  for  the  principal  and  his  family, 
living-room  and  bedrooms  for  the  women  teachers,  laundry,  kitchen, 
etc.  It  should  be  equipped  with  a  view  to  providing  in  the  com- 
munity a  model  of  tasteful  and  economical  domestic  furnishing  and 
decoration.  The  rentals  and  other  charges  should  be  so  regulated 
as  to  provide  for  the  maintenance,  insurance,  repairs,  and  renewals 
of  equipment,  but  not  for  a  sinking  fund.  The  house  should  be  re- 
garded as  a  part  of  the  school  plant  and  included  in  the  regular  bond 
issue  for  construction.  A  privately  owned  manse  in  Illinois  is  net- 
ting eight  per  cent  on  an  investment  of  $10,000. 

The  manse  has  a  bearing  in  several  ways  upon  the  educational 
work  of  the  school.  Flowers  and  vegetable  gardens  are  natural 
features  of  school  premises  which  are  also  residence  quarters.  The 
domestic-science  work  of  the  school  can  be  connected  in  valuable 


•So 


THE   TEACHERAGE  205 

ways  with  the  practical  problems  of  manse  management.  The  cost 
accounting  offers  a  capital  example  of  bookkeeping.  The  use  of  the 
school  as  a  community  centre  is  widened  and  its  value  enhanced. 
The  school  as  an  institution  takes  on  a  more  vital  character  in  the  eyes 
of  the  countryside. 

Most  of  all  is  the  effect  upon  the  teacher.  Comfortably  heated, 
well-lighted  quarters,  comradeship  with  colleagues — and  at  the  same 
time  personal  privacy — a  satisfying,  co-operatively  managed  table, 
independence  of  the  petty  family  rivalries  of  a  small  community,  a 
recognized  institutional  status,  combine  to  attract  to  the  consolidated 
rural-school  manse  teachers  of  a  type  which  will  put  the  country 
school  abreast  of  the  modern  educational  movement.  It  is  futile  to 
preach  the  gospel  of  sacrifice  for  the  cause  of  rural  education.  There 
is  no  reason  why  rural  teachers  should  be  called  upon  to  sacrifice 
themselves.  They  ought  not  to  do  it,  and  they  will  not  do  it.  The 
school  manse  is  not  a  fad,  nor  a  luxury;  it  is  a  fundamental  necessity. 

The  General  Plan. — The  architecture  and  location  of 
the  home,  or  homes,  should  be  pleasing  and  convenient. 
A  landscape  artist  should  plan  the  location  and  beautifica- 
tion  of  the  various  buildings,  the  farm,  the  playgrounds, 
and  other  features.  If  the  principal's  home  alone  is  con- 
structed at  first,  space  in  the  ground-planning  should  be 
left  for  the  other  homes  for  teachers  and  men-of-all-work 
about  the  school  plant.  The  school  building  also  should  be 
erected  with  the  future  extensions  plotted  so  that  the  whole 
plant  and  site  will  be  planned  with  reference  to  possible 
future  developments.  Many  general  designs  for  such  plants 
have  been  printed  in  the  reports  of  various  State  superin- 
tendents and  students  of  this  question.  The  United  States 
Bureau  of  Education  has  a  model  of  a  complete  plant  which 
was  exhibited  at  the  Pan-American  Exposition,  and  is 
published  in  its  volume  on  the  exhibit  there.  A  reproduction 
of  it  will  be  found  in  the  last  chapter  of  this  volume.  With 
not  less  than  twenty  acres  of  land,  a  school  building  as  de- 
scribed in  Chapter  IX,  and  modern  homes  for  teachers  and 
caretaker,  such  exhibits  might  well  be  set  up  in  every  county 
seat.     One  of  these  may  be  taken  and  adapted,  or  used 


206  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

merely  as  a  suggestion.  Our  plea  here  is  for  forward  look- 
ing and  consistent  planning,  which  at  present  is  an  almost 
entirely  absent  quantity  in  the  work  of  perhaps  most  school 
boards  in  the  United  States. 

Herewith  we  present  a  few  suggestive  plans  with  photo- 
graphs of  exteriors  of  school  homes  that  have  been  erected. 
The  best  is  not  too  good  for  the  teacherage.  Less  than  the 
best  is  a  poor  investment  if  it  is  to  function  as  an  example 
and  an  inspiration  or  the  contrary  to  country  folk  for  fifty 
or  more  years.  Enterprising  communities  will  soon  go  far 
beyond  what  has  already  been  done  in  this  new  and  very 
interesting  line  of  development  in  American  rural  education. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Josephine  Corliss  Preston — "Teachers'  Cottages  in  Washington." 

Bulletin  No.  27,  191 5.     Olympia,  Washington. 

2.  "Cottage  Homes  for  Teachers."    Southern  School  Journal^  24  :  11- 

12,  May,  1913. 

3.  Southern  School  Journal,  24  :  11-13,  July,  191 3. 

4.  Mary  B.  Flemington — **The  Teachers'  Boarding  Place."    Amer- 

ican School  Board  Journal,  50 :  18,  February,  191 5. 

5.  "Homes  for  Rural  Teachers."    North  Carolina  Educationy  9 :  18, 

March,  191 5. 

6.  Mrs.    Percy    V.    Pennybacker — "Need    of    Teachers'    Homes." 

Ladies'  Home  Journal,  32  :  25,  February,  191 5.     Illustrated. 

7.  "Teacherage."    Ladies'  Home  Journal,  31  :  5,  September,  1914. 

8.  Mrs.  Mary  I.  Wood— "The  School  Manse  in  Reality."     Ladies' 

Home  Journal,  32  :  25,  February,  191 5. 
Other  publications  which  will  be  found  particularly   helpful  in 
this  connection  are: 

9.  Fletcher    B.    Dresslar — "Rural    Schoolhouses    and    Grounds." 

Bulletin,  1914,  No.  12,  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education. 

10.  Wm.  L.  Hall — "Tree  Planting  on  Rural  School  Grounds."    Farm- 

ers' Bulletin,  No.  134,  U.  S.  Department  of  Agriculture. 

11.  A.   C.   Monahan  and  Adams  Phillips — "The  Farragut  School." 

Bulletin,  1913,  No.  49,  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education. 

12.  A.  C.  Monahan — "The  Status  of  Rural  Education  in  the  United 

States."     Bulletin,  1913,  No.  8,  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education. 
13. "County   Unit   Organization   for   the   Administration   of 


THE   TEACHERAGE  207 

Rural  Schools."     Bulletin,  1914,  No.  44,  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Edu- 
cation. 

14.  R.  S.  Kellog — "Teachers'  Cottages."   The  National  Lumber  Manu- 

facturers' Association. 

15.  L.  L.  Lumsden,  M.D. — "Rural  Sanitation."    U.  S,  Government 

Printing  Office. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  Look  up  the  work  and  success  of  the  General  Education  Board 

in  establishing  model  consolidated-school  plants,  including 
teacherages,  in  various  parts  of  the  country,  as  at  Alberta, 
Minn.  Should  teacherages  be  rented  by  school  boards  or  pro- 
vided free  or  as  part  of  the  salary? 

2.  In  the  Annals  of  the  American  Academy  of  Political  and  Social 

Science,  September,  191 7,  President  Vincent,  as  quoted  above, 
shows  what  a  profit  a  private  corporation  is  making  on  a  teach- 
erage  costing  $10,000.  Would  it  be  desirable  to  encourage 
building  firms  to  put  up  such  teacherages  adjoining  consolidated 
schools  and  rent  them  to  teachers? 

3.  Report  on  the  Alberta  teacherage,  gathering  data  from  several 

sources,  such  as  a  letter  to  the  principal,  Arp's  book  on  "Rural 
Education  and  the  Consolidated  School"  (World  Book  Co.),  etc. 

4.  Get  reports  on  the  teacherage,  teacher's  cottage,  or  school  manse, 

from  such  States  as  Washington  and  Texas,  each  with  several 
hundred  teacherages  at  this  time  of  writing.  Select  the  best  type 
for  your  part  of  the  country  and  give  reasons  for  selecting  it. 

5.  What  advantages  and  disadvantages  would  accrue  from  having 

such  a  teacherage  as  the  one  at  Alberta  in  connection  with  a 
consolidated  school  situated,  not  in  the  open  country,  but  in  a 
village  trading  centre? 

6.  What  help  can  you  obtain  in  settling  on  the  best  type  of  teacher- 

age from  your  State  Board  of  Education  or  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of 
Education? 


CHAPTER  XI 
TRANSPORTATION   OF   PUPILS   AT   PUBLIC   EXPENSE 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  are  some  of  the  chief  advantages  and  disadvantages  of  pupils 

walking  to  the  one-room  schools? 

2.  What  effect  does  it  frequently  have  on  attendance?    On  health? 

On  morals?     On  punctuaHty? 

3.  What  is  the  difference  in  these  respects  arising  from  transportation 

of  the  right  kind? 

4.  In  what  ways  may  consolidation  be  a  means  of  obtaining  better 

roads  ? 

5.  What  regular  routes  of  wagon  and  automobile  travel  and  trans- 

portation are  maintained  throughout  the  year  by  the  government 
post-ofhce  and  other  agencies? 

I.    When  Transportation  Is  Necessary 

Public  transportation  of  pupils  is  not  always  a  neces- 
sary part  of  the  programme  of  consolidation.  It  depends 
upon  the  size  of  the  district  to  be  served  by  the  consoli- 
dated schools.  If  the  district  is  not  greater  than  10  square 
miles,  and  nearly  as  wide  as  long,  with  the  school  located 
near  the  centre  of  the  territory,  no  child  under  ordinary 
conditions  would  live  beyond  walking  distance.  A  square 
3  miles  on  the  side  would  contain  9  square  miles  of  terri- 
tory, 80  per  cent  of  which  would  be  within  1.5  miles  of  the 
centre.  No  point  of  the  square  would  be  farther  away 
from  a  school  if  located  at  the  centre  than  1.73  miles.  Of 
course  the  distances  by  travelled  roadways  would  be  greater 
than  this.  If  no  rural  school  served  a  territory  of  less  than 
9  miles,  however,  there  would  be  but  approximately  one-half 
of  the  present  number  of  rural  schools  in  the  half  of  the 
United  States  east  of  a  line  extending  north  and  south  to 
our  borders,  through  the  centre  of  Nebraska  and  Kansas. 

208 


TRANSPORTATION  OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      209 

In  many  parts  of  the  United  States  (in  most  of  the 
strictly  farming  country)  districts  larger  than  9  square  miles 
will  have  to  be  taken  to  secure  enough  children  to  make  a 
school  large  enough  to  require  the  services  of  three  or  more 
teachers — the  minimal  number  of  teachers  if  the  school  is 
to  be  really  satisfactory.  To  obtain  large  enough  taxing 
areas  to  provide  not  only  sufficient  pupils  but  enough  money 
to  provide  a  first-class  school  plant  and  upkeep,  a  larger 
area  is  desirable.  Transportation  then  becomes  necessary, 
although  there  are  many  consolidated  schools  in  all  parts 
of  the  country  serving  much  greater  or  larger  districts  than 
9  square  miles  that  do  not  furnish  public  transportation, 
the  parents  making  such  arrangements  as  they  see  fit  to  get 
their  children  to  school. 

II.     Requirements 

Importance  of  Satisfactory  Transportation. — Without 
doubt  the  question  of  transportation  is  the  most  difficult 
one  connected  with  the  consoHdation  of  schools.  The 
transportation  furnished  must  be  absolutely  satisfactory  or 
there  will  be  constant  dissatisfaction  with  the  school.  Fifty 
years  of  experience  in  transporting  country  children  to  pubUc 
schools  in  the  United  States  has  shown  quite  definitely  the 
essentials  that  must  be  provided  if  the  transportation  is  to 
be  satisfactory.     These  essentials  are: 

1.  A  route  not  too  long  to  be  covered  in  reasonable 
time. 

2.  A  definite  time  schedule  for  each  wagon. 

3.  A  comfortable  and  safe  vehicle. 

4.  A  satisfactory  driver. 

The  Transportation  Route. — The  length  of  the  satis- 
factory route  cannot  be  stated  in  miles — the  important  con- 
sideration is  the  time  element,  and  this  of  course  depends 
upon  many  things  besides  the  distance.  No  route  should 
be  longer  than  can  be  covered  under  average  conditions  in 
45  minutes,  or  in  bad  conditions  in  about  an  hour.     This 


2IO  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

means  usually  with  good  roads  and  horse  vehicles  not  over 
6  miles.  If  automobiles  are  used,  the  distance  may  be 
greater. 

The  transportation  wagon  should  run  on  a  fixed  schedule, 
leaving  certain  points  along  the  route  at  the  exact  time 
announced.  Children  will  then  know  at  what  time  to 
leave  their  homes  to  meet  the  wagons  without  being  re- 
quired to  stand  and  wait.  Wagons  should  not  wait  for  the 
children  if  they  are  not  at  the  proper  places  on  the  scheduled 
time.  The  condition  of  the  road  should  not  be  allowed  to 
interfere  with  the  schedule;  the  contract  with  the  driver 
should  require  him  to  furnish  the  necessary  ''horse-power" 
to  get  through  on  time.  Of  course,  two  different  schedules 
may  be  arranged — one  for  good  travelling  and  one  for  the 
bad  road  season.  Where  children  live  off  the  road  at  some 
distance  a  small  shelter-house  may  be  erected.  A  mail  and 
parcel-post  box  may  be  placed  in  the  shelter. 

Whether  the  wagons  should  follow  the  main  highways 
or  should  go  to  the  homes  to  pick  up  the  children  is  a  ques- 
tion which  has  caused  considerable  trouble.  In  the  early 
experiments  with  transportation,  the  conveyance  was  from 
the  abandoned  school  building  to  the  new  school,  the 
children  assembling  at  the  old  building.  Later,  starting- 
places  were  established  at  points  nearer  the  homes  of  the 
children  who  lived  farthest  away  from  the  school,  and  the 
other  children  were  picked  up  along  the  route.  To  settle 
difficulties  which  arose  over  arranging  the  routes  nearer  to 
one  home  than  to  another,  the  practice  began  of  having  the 
school  wagons  leave  the  main  road  and  travel  in  and  out 
byways  to  the  homes.  Such  practice  lengthens  greatly  the 
time  required  to  cover  the  route,  and  is  never  satisfactory. 
The  most  satisfactory  plan  is  to  arrange  the  routes  in  such 
a  manner  as  to  accommodate  the  majority  of  children,  re- 
quiring all  to  meet  the  wagon  at  fixed  places  along  the 
route.  For  children  living  more  than  a  mile  from  any  route 
special  arrangements  must  be  made.    A  suggestion  is  given 


TRANSPORTATION   OF   PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      211 

later  in  discussing  the  practice  more  or  less  common  of 
paying  the  parents  who  provide  transportation  for  their 
children. 

The  Wagon. — A  comfortable  and  safe  wagon  is  ab- 
solutely necessary.  In  the  earlier  days  districts  did  not  fur- 
nish wagons,  leaving  the  matter  to  the  persons  awarded  the 
contract.  This  necessarily  limited  the  number  who  would 
undertake  the  job,  as  the  cost  of  a  satisfactory  wagon  was 
too  great.  It  resulted  in  the  employment  of  unsatisfactory 
drivers  and  in  the  use  of  many  unsatisfactory  conveyances. 
Now  the  majority  of  schools  own  the  wagons,  hiring  the 
drivers,  who  furnish  the  teams.  Some  of  the  essentials  of 
a  good  wagon  are  given  below.  So  important  is  the  kind  of 
wagon  that  Minnesota,  which  gives  special  State  aid  to  assist 
transportation,  requires  the  use  of  wagons  answering  definite 
specifications  as  a  condition  upon  which  State  aid  is  received. 

Essentials  of  the  Wagon. — The  wagon  must  be  well  built, 
strong,  safe,  and  warm.  It  must  be  covered  and  equipped 
with  side-pieces  to  keep  out  wind  and  storm.  Glass  sides 
are  much  better  than  curtains,  since  the  children  then 
never  sit  in  semi-darkness,  and  in  addition  they  can  see  the 
country  as  they  pass  along.  This  results  in  better  conduct. 
Doors  should  be  provided  at  both  ends,  and  the  front  wheels 
should  "  cut  under,"  making  turning  easy.  The  best  wagons 
are  built  so  that  the  driver  sits  inside  with  the  children. 
He  is  then  in  a  position  to  require  proper  conduct  and  con- 
versation on  the  part  of  the  boys  and  girls  under  his  charge. 
In  cold  weather  the  floor  is  covered  with  rugs  or  with  straw, 
and  lap-robes  are  provided.  Often  wagons  are  heated  by 
coal  or  oil  stoves  placed  sometimes  inside  and  sometimes 
outside,  and  under  the  wagons.  Footstones  or  planks  of 
hardwood  are  sometimes  used,  being  heated  by  parents  at 
their  homes  in  the  morning,  and  again  on  the  school  stove 
for  the  return  trip.  In  the  West  bags  of  heated  wheat  are 
sometimes  used.  Artificial  heat,  however,  is  unnecessary 
except  in  extreme  cold,  or  on  long  routes. 


212  THE   CONSOLroATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

The  Driver. — Among  those  who  have  had  experience 
with  transportation  in  school  wagons  and  in  other  public 
carriers,  the  sentiment  seems  to  be  much  in  favor  of  the 
wagon  when  properly  managed.  The  trip  in  the  steam  or 
electric  trolley  car  is  made  more  quickly  and  in  greater  com- 
fort, but  the  conduct  of  the  children  on  public  carriers  is 
not  always  so  satisfactory  as  in  school  wagons  where  com- 
petent drivers  are  employed.  The  children  recognize  the 
right  of  the  school  directors  to  dictate  their  conduct  while 
they  are  riding  on  wagons  owned  or  leased  by  the  school 
and  driven  by  men  or  women  who  have  the  same  authority 
over  them  as  their  teachers.  When  riding  in  other  public 
carriers,  children,  as  a  rule,  feel  that  they  are  outside  the 
authority  of  the  school  directors. 

Satisfactory  transportation  is  obtained  only  when  com- 
petent drivers  are  employed.  Great  care  must  be  taken  to 
select  drivers  who  are  trustworthy,  temperate,  careful,  and 
whose  words  will  be  respected  and  obeyed.  In  some  in- 
stances, older  schoolboys  living  near  the  end  of  the  route 
drive  the  wagons,  keeping  the  teams  in  the  vicinity  of  the 
school  during  the  day.  The  plan  is  seldom  satisfactory. 
In  many  cases  wagons  are  driven  by  women,  particularly 
during  the  busy  seasons  on  the  farm.  In  bad  weather  their 
places  are  taken  by  their  husbands.  This  arrangement  is 
usually  satisfactory.  The  use  of  a  farm  teamster  or  ''hired 
man"  is  not  to  be  recommended.  Whenever  a  parent  of 
one  or  more  of  the  children  transported  is  employed  the  ser- 
vice is  usually  satisfactory. 

As  evidence  of  the  importance  of  proper  wagons  and 
drivers  the  following  from  the  Carnegie  Foundation  Report 
on  Education  in  Vermont  is  given: 

In  places  where  transportation  has  not  been  satisfactory  the  diffi- 
culty is  often  due  either  to  the  driver  or  to  the  conveyance.  Parents 
charged  that  a  rough  boy  driver  had  taught  their  boys  to  smoke,  and 
tolerated  and  even  encouraged  disorder.  Older  drivers  were  sometimes 
intoxicated.      Satisfaction   almost  always  follows  when  a  driver  is 


TRANSPORTATION  OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      213 

either  a  father  or  a  mother  of  some  of  the  children.  A  second  source 
of  difficulty  is  the  type  of  wagon  or  sleigh  used.  Wagons  may  be  so 
crowded  that  the  children  are  uncomfortable.  .  .  .  Sometimes  other 
loads  also  are  carried,  and  the  children  are  made  to  walk  up  hills  and 
over  bad  roads.  Sometimes  sufficient  blankets  are  not  supplied. 
The  greatest  satisfaction  has  been  experienced  with  the  ''school 
barges"  purchased  by  some  of  the  towns.  For  fall  and  spring  these 
are  spring  wagons  with  top  and  sides  curtained  for  protection  from 
rain  and  sun.  The  seats  extend  along  the  sides  and  are  cushioned. 
For  winter  use  there  are  sleighs  with  closed  tops.  In  none  of  those 
observed  was  there  provision  for  heating,  but  the  drivers  had  often 
procured  soapstone  or  pieces  of  hardwood,  which  they  heated  over 
the  school  stove  and  placed  at  the  feet  of  the  pupils  on  their  way 
home.  These  same  objects  were  heated  in  the  homes  of  the  pupils 
in  the  morning  and  used  on  the  way  to  school. 

The  following  also  in  reference  to  Vermont,  but  not 
from  the  report  just  quoted,  is  further  evidence: 

It  is  gratifying  to  report  that  several  towns  during  the  past  bien- 
nium  have  purchased  barges  specially  constructed  for  the  conveyance 
of  school  children.  In  consequence  the  opposition  to  consolidation 
in  those  towns  has  been  greatly  reduced,  as  parents  in  general  are  not 
so  much  exercised  over  the  question  of  transportation  as  they  are 
over  the  kind  provided.  The  experience  of  those  towns  which  have 
provided  proper  and  comfortable  conveyance  ought  to  be  suggestive 
to  the  towns  which  have  not  so  provided. 

The  Automobile  for  Transportation. — The  automobile 
is  being  used  in  large  numbers  for  transportation  of  school 
children  in  many  sections  of  the  country,  particularly  in  the 
Eastern  States  and  in  California.  It  is  exceedingly  satis- 
factory under  proper  management,  and  with  good  roads 
much  more  rapid  than  the  horse-drawn  vehicle.  In  many 
instances  where  ''auto-busses"  are  used,  it  is  found  neces- 
sary to  use  horses  and  sleds  during  the  heavy  snows,  and 
wagons  for  a  short  while  during  the  muddy  season.  This 
plan  is  very  feasible,  since  the  time  of  the  year  when  the 
automobile  cannot  well  be  used  is  the  time  when  farm 
teams  have  the  least  work  and  can  be  obtained  most  easily. 

In  several  places  where  automobiles  are  used  one  car 


214  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

brings  to  the  school  each  day  two  separate  loads.  The 
writer  is  familiar  with  a  consolidated  school  located  at  a 
cross-roads.  There  are  no  children  on  the  road  to  the  north. 
Twenty-five  children  from  the  west  are  brought  in  in  one 
wagon.  There  are  thirty  on  the  road  to  the  east,  the 
farthest  living  4  miles  from  the  school.  An  automobile-bus 
leaves  the  end  of  this  route  at  8  o'clock,  reaching  school  at 
8.30.  It  immediately  departs  to  the  south  to  the  end  of  the 
route  3  miles  away,  bringing  in  on  the  return  trip  twenty 
children,  who  arrive  at  the  school  before  9.10.  School  opens 
at  8.45  and  closes  for  those  on  the  route  from  the  east  at 
3.00  p.  m.,  for  the  others  at  3.30.  The  first  period  in  the 
morning  and  the  last  in  the  afternoon  are  devoted  to  indus- 
trial work,  so  that  the  "graded"  work  is  not  in  any  way  in- 
terfered with  by  the  absence  of  part  of  the  school  these  two 
periods.  In  many  places,  of  course,  automobiles  are  used 
every  day  in  the  school  year,  are  heated  by  the  exhaust, 
and  are  entirely  satisfactory.  In  numerous  consolidated 
areas  the  automobile  is  displacing  the  wagon. 

Transportation  and  the  Roads. — Transportation  is,  of 
course,  much  easier  in  a  district  with  good  roads  than  in 
one  with  bad  roads,  and  there  are  many  roads  in  the  coun- 
try so  bad  that  transportation  of  school  children  is  impossi- 
ble over  them  during  certain  seasons  of  the  year.  However, 
if  the  roads  are  good  enough  for  the  children  to  pass  over 
on  foot  they  are  passable  for  wagons,  and  the  wagons  would 
bring  them  to  the  school  with  dry  feet  and  clothes.  In 
muddy  and  wet  weather  many  children  who  walk  to  school 
over  bad  roads  are  required  to  sit  with  wet  feet  during  the 
day.     Much  ill  health  is  undoubtedly  due  to  this  exposure. 

The  large  number  of  wagons  used  in  all  parts  of  the 
country,  and  over  all  sorts  of  roads,  is  the  best  evidence  that 
the  consolidated  school  with  public  transportation  may  be 
established  in  a  section  with  poor  roads.  Mr.  J.  B.  Eggle- 
ston,  formerly  State  superintendent  of  Virginia,  speaking  of 
the  success  of  transportation  in  that  State,  says: 


TRANSPORTATION  OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      215 

During  the  fifth  year  (191 2)  of  this  policy  we  have  over  200 
wagons  running  in  all  sections  of  the  State  and  under  almost  every 
possible  condition.  We  have  routes  as  long  as  8  miles  and  as  short 
as  2>^  miles.  We  have  wagons  on  good  roads  and  bad  roads,  on  level 
roads  and  mountain  roads,  on  rocky  roads  and  sand  roads,  on  mac- 
adam roads  and  red-clay  roads.  We  have  transportation  wagons 
of  the  latest  and  most  modern  type,  and  we  have  ordinary  farm- 
wagons  fitted  up  for  the  new  and  precious  freight.  We  have  one- 
horse  and  two-horse  wagons,  and  in  one  instance  we  have  a  four-horse 
transportation  wagon,  or  "kid  cart,"  as  it  is  called,  which  hauls  be- 
tween 45  and  50  children  to  school  every  day. 

The  Minnesota  commissioner  of  rural  schools  says: 

For  a  considerable  period  of  years,  too,  children  have  been  suc- 
cessfully transported  in  this  State,  in  widely  separated  portions,  under 
road  and  weather  conditions  about  as  favorable  and  about  as  unfa- 
vorable as  the  State  affords.  Personal  investigation  of  the  situation 
has  shown  that  transportation  in  Minnesota  is  entirely  practicable 
and  generally  satisfactory. 

Nothing  stimulates  good-road  building  like  the  necessity  for  road 
travel.  Consolidation  has  fairly  intoxicated  communities  with  a 
zeal  for  road-building.  Some  districts  still  have  very  poor  transporta- 
tion routes;  but  many  miles  of  road  previously  impassable  in  wet 
seasons  have  already  been  put  in  good  condition,  and  the  good  work 
will  be  taken  up  again  with  the  next  open  season.  In  a  word,  poor 
roads  can  be  made  into  good  roads  and  this  transformation  will  be  made 
with  promptitude  where  transportation  of  school  children  is  in  vogue. 

Thus  consolidation  brings  good  roads,  and  a  community- 
need  not  refrain  from  consolidation  because  of  poor  roads. 
The  consolidated  school  is  the  best  device  for  promoting 
good  roads. 

Payment  to  Parents  in  Lieu  of  Transportation. — The 
plan  of  allowing  parents  or  guardians  a  certain  amount  per 
day  for  providing  conveyance  for  their  own  children  is  in 
operation  to  a  certain  extent  in  many  States.  It  is  proba- 
bly the  only  plan  feasible  in  sparsely  settled  districts,  and 
where  roads  are  very  poor.  In  such  cases  children  journey 
to  school  in  buggies,  on  horseback,  or  on  bicycles.  Often 
the  school  furnishes  a  shed  for  the  horses.     The  amount 


2l6  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

allowed  parents  in  South  Dakota,  Wisconsin,  and  a  few- 
other  States  varies  from  lo  cents  per  child  per  day  to  25 
cents,  the  amount  depending  upon  the  distance  from  the 
home  to  the  school.  Allowance  is  made  only  for  the  actual 
number  of  days  attended. 

The  plan  has  several  advantages  and  several  disadvan- 
tages. Its  principal  advantage  is  that  children  ride  from 
their  own  homes  to  the  school  by  the  most  direct  route  and, 
as  a  rule,  in  less  time  than  would  be  taken  by  a  school 
wagon.  One  of  the  principal  disadvantages  is  the  expense. 
It  does  not  require  a  larger  expenditure  of  school  funds,  but 
the  total  expended  by  the  school  patrons  is  much  greater. 
A  large  amount  must  be  invested  in  horses  and  vehicles, 
and  stabling  and  feed  for  the  horses  provided.  If  the  chil- 
dren themselves  drive,  the  horse  is  not  available  for  other 
work  on  school-days.  Another  disadvantage  is  that  it  does 
not  assure  the  regularity  of  attendance  and  the  freedom 
from  tardiness  resulting  from  the  use  of  transportation 
wagons,  or  of  public  electric  or  steam  railroads. 

III.     General  Considerations 

The  Success  of  Transportation. — The  success  of  furnish- 
ing transportation  seems  to  be  universal  wherever  properly 
handled.  An  interesting  study  made  in  Connecticut  by 
the  secretary  of  the  State  board  of  education  is  reported 
in  his  annual  report  for  19 13. 

The  expense  per  pupil  for  conveyance  to  elementary 
schools  in  Connecticut  for  1911-12  was  $23.69  for  the  school 
year  of  184  days.  The  total  number  of  children  conveyed 
was  3,481;  the  total  expenditure,  $82,465.97.  This  does 
not  include  $42,968.83  paid  for  the  transportation  of  high- 
school  pupils.  The  elementary  children  were  transported 
by  school  wagons,  trolley-cars,  steam  railroads,  and  by  pri- 
vate conveyances.  In  many  cases  parents  are  paid  a  cer- 
tain amount  per  day  in  heu  of  transportation. 

The  report  mentioned  gives  for  each  .township  in  the 
State  the  number  of  elementary  school  children  transported, 


TRANSPORTATION   OF   PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC   EXPENSE      217 

the  cost  for  the  year,  and  whether  or  not  the  transportation 
is,  on  the  whole,  satisfactory  to  the  parents  and  beneficial 
to  the  schools.  There  are  120  townships  in  the  State  that 
reported  children  transported.  Of  these,  8  failed  to  report 
on  the  last  item.  The  others  reported  as  follows,  the  re- 
ports being  made  by  the  local  school  authorities: 

Satisfactory  to  parents  and  beneficial  to  schools 95 

Unsatisfactory  to  parents  but  beneficial  to  schools 9 

Unsatisfactory  to  parents  and  not  beneficial  to  schools 4 

Unsatisfactory  to  parents  and  no  report  whether  beneficial  or  not  4 

Professor  A.  B.  Graham,  formerly  at  the  head  of  the 
agricultural  extension  service  of  the  Ohio  State  University, 
made  a  study  of  the  satisfaction  to  school  patrons  of  trans- 
portation to  Ohio  consolidated  schools.     He  states  that: 

80  per  cent  of  the  parents  report  that  their  children  attend  more 
regularly  xinder  transportation  than  they  did  previously. 

90  per  cent  report  their  children  more  interested  in  school  than 
before. 

95  per  cent  think  their  teachers  show  more  interest  in  their  work. 
100  per  cent  practically  agree  that  the  social  and  educational  inter- 
ests of  the  township  consolidated  have  greatly  improved. 

75  per  cent  of  those  who  were  formerly  opposed  to  consolidation  and 
transportation  are  now  in  favor  of  it. 

Miss  Mabel  C.  Williams,  superintendent  of  Shelby 
County,  Tenn.,  writes  as  follows: 

The  transportation  of  pupils  in  public-school  wagons  has  proved 
to  be  a  great  success  in  Shelby  County.  The  system  was  instituted 
eight  years  ago.  We  now  have  15  wagons  running,  with  petitions  for 
many  more  as  soon  as  we  can  build  the  consolidated  schools.  It 
would  be  impossible  to  persuade  the  pupils  who  ride  in  the  wagons 
to  leave  the  consolidated  schools  and  go  back  to  the  one-teacher  or 
two-teacher  schools  from  whence  they  came.  The  parents  and 
teachers  appreciate  the  greater  advantages  which  the  large  school 
offers.  We  find  that  the  attendance  is  better  on  the  wagon  routes, 
as  the  children  do  not  have  to  consider  the  weather.  Only  one  child 
has  ever  been  hurt  on  the  wagons,  and  that  was  not  serious.  We  have 
carried  as  many  as  50  in.  one  wagon.    I  do  not  remember  that  we  have 


2l8  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

ever  had  a  complaint  of  drunkenness,  profanity,  tardiness,  or  care- 
lessness on  the  part  of  the  wagon  drivers.  In  fact,  most  of  the  trouble 
which  is  anticipated  from  the  adoption  of  the  public-school  wagon 
never  happens. 

Seymour  Rockwell,  in  1893,  wrote  as  follows  regarding 
the  Montague  consolidated  school  in  Massachusetts,  men- 
tioned in  a  previous  chapter: 

For  18  years  we  have  had  the  best  attendance  from  the  trans- 
ported children;  no  more  sickness  among  them,  and  no  accidents. 
The  children  like  the  plan  exceedingly.  We  have  saved  the  town  at 
least  $600  a  year.  All  these  children  now  attend  a  well-equipped 
schoolhouse  at  the  centre.  The  schools  are  graded;  everybody  is 
converted  to  the  plan.  We  encountered  all  the  opposition  found  any- 
where, but  we  asserted  our  sensible  and  legal  rights  and  accomplished 
the  work.  I  see  no  way  of  bringing  the  country  schools  up  but  to 
consolidate  them,  making  them  worth  seeing;  then  the  people  will  be 
more  likely  to  do  their  duty  by  visiting  them. 

With  its  largest  attendance  the  school  enrolled  about 
175  pupils,  more  than  one-fourth  of  whom  were  in  high-school 
grades.  Pupils  came  to  the  high  school  from  neighboring 
districts,  which  were  able  to  take  care  of  elementary  pupils 
locally,  but  wanted  the  special  high-school  opportunities. 
The  children  were  transported  in  six  school  wagons,  and 
later  in  five  wagons  and  one  trolley-car. 

The  total  number  of  children  transported  in  191 2-13 
was  85,  at  a  total  expenditure  of  $1,550.82,  or  10  cents  per 
pupil  per  day.  Each  driver  received  an  average  of  $1.70 
per  day,  or  $312  per  year,  and  carried  an  average  of  17 
children.  The  shortest  route  is  2  miles,  the  longest  4.5 
miles.  The  drivers  furnish  their  own  wagons  and  teams. 
The  wagons  must  be  enclosed  in  stormy  weather,  and 
equipped  with  straw  or  rugs  under  foot,  and  with  robes. 
The  drivers  are  under  contract  with  the  school  authorities 
and  must  cover  the  routes  on  schedule  time.  They  have 
full  authority  over  the  children  while  on  the  road,  and  en- 
force good  conduct.  The  wagons  do  not  stop  at  all  the 
houses  where  pupils  live,  but  follow  routes  laid  out  by  the 


A  good  barn  for  horses,  vans,  bicycles,  auto-busses,  and  other  vehicles, 
Preble  County,  Ohio 


Ten  in  a  row  ready  for  the  home  trip,  Preble  County,  Ohio.     Automobiles 
are  rapidly  replacing  these 


TRANSPORTATION   OF  PUPILS   AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      219 

school    authorities,    picking   up    the    children    along    these 
routes. 

The  41  years  of  its  existence  have  given  ample  oppor- 
tunity to  compare  the  value  of  the  consolidated  school  with 
the  one-teacher  school  and  to  work  out  satisfactorily  many 
of  the  problems  in  connection  with  public  transportation 
Also  there  has  been  afforded  an  opportunity  to  study  the 
advantages  and  disadvantages  of  transportation  in  school 
wagons  under  school  authority  and  in  public  electric  cars. 
The  experience  has  resulted  in  a  sentiment  in  favor  of  the 
school  wagons.  Little  disorderly  conduct  or  improper 
speech  ever  occurred  on  the  wagons,  while  both  occurred 
more  or  less  frequently  on  the  cars.  The  wagon  drivers, 
because  they  were  engaged  by  the  school  board,  were  recog- 
nized by  the  children  as  in  authority;  the  carmen  were  not 
so  recognized. 

W.  L.  Eaton,  formerly  superintendent  of  schools  of 
Concord,  Mass.,  wrote  about  the  same  year  of  the  Emerson 
ConsoHdated  School  of  that  town,  established  in  1879,  with 
transportation  to  the  school,  as  follows: 

The  natural  reluctance  of  parents  to  send  their  young  children 
so  far  from  home  and  for  all  day,  to  attend  the  centre  school,  has 
vanished.  The  children  are  conveyed  in  comfortable  vehicles  fitted 
up  for  their  accommodation.  They  are  in  charge  of  trusty  drivers 
en  route,  and  at  noon  they  are  under  the  especial  care  of  one  of  the 
teachers,  who  has  an  extra  compensation  for  the  service.  When  it  is 
practicable,  a  farmer  living  near  the  extreme  end  of  the  district  is 
employed  to  convey  the  children.  Often  the  farmer's  wife  drives 
the  conveyance — an  arrangement  that  meets  the  entire  approval  of 
the  school  committee,  and  is,  perhaps,  the  most  satisfactory  one  pos- 
sible. As  a  rule  the  committee  do  not  approve  of  intrusting  the  duty 
to  the  hired  man.  Three  2-horse  barges  and  two  i-horse  wagons  are 
in  use  at  present.  All  these  vehicles  are  fitted  with  seats  running 
lengthwise  and  are  closed  or  open  at  sides  and  ends  as  the  weather 
requires,  and  in  cold  weather  are  provided  with  blankets  and  straw. 
The  driver  starts  from  or  near  the  remote  end  of  his  district  and  drives 
down  the  principal  thoroughfare,  taking  up  the  children  at  their  own 
doors  or  at  cross-street  corners. 

The  attendance  of  the  children  conveyed  is  several  per  cent  better 


220 


THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 


than  that  of  the  village  children,  and  it  is  far  higher  than  it  was  in 
the  old  district  schools.  This  is  not  strange  when  one  reflects  that 
the  children  are  taken  at  or  near  their  own  doors  and  conveyed  to 
school  without  exposure  in  stormy  weather  and  with  entire  comfort 
in  cold  or  snowy  weather.  Discipline  in  the  carriages  is  maintained 
readily,  as  the  driver  has  authority  to  put  out  any  unruly  child. 
The  children  are  conveyed  from  i>2  to  3^  miles. 

Contract  with  Driver. — A  definite  written  contract  with 
the  driver  is  very  important.  The  following  is  in  use  in 
.Randolph  County,  Ind.: 

CONTRACT  FOR  HAULING   SCHOOL   CHILDREN 


Route  No. 


Township 


Contract  entered  into  on 19  •  • ,  between , 

party  of  the  first  part,  and  ,  trustee  of  

school  township  of  Randolph  County,  Ind.,  party  of  the  second  part. 

The  party  of  the  first  part  (for  the  sum  named  below  to  be  paid 
by  the  party  of  the  second  part)  agrees  to  perform  the  following  work: 

To  drive  the  school  wagon  on  route  No in school 

township  of  Randolph  County,  Ind.,  and  haul  all  the  children  of 
school  age  now  residing  and  adjacent  to  said  route  (or  who  may  be 
along  said  route  during  the  life  of  this  contract)  to  and  from  the  school, 
according  to  the  following  schedule.  The  said  schedule  to  be  as  fol- 
lows unless  changed  by  the  trustee: 


Commencing  at  the — 

Standard  sun. 

Returning. 

Standard  sun. 



Thence  to  the         .... 

Leaving School  at 

School  arriving  at. 

TRANSPORTATION  OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      221 

Said  work  is  to  be  governed  by  the  following  conditions: 

1 .  The  said school  township  is  to  furnish  the  wagon 

to  be  used  and  keep  it  in  repair. 

2.  The  said  party  of  the  first  part  is  to  furnish,  keep,  and  feed  all 
the  horses,  and  furnish  harness,  necessary  to  haul  the  wagon  on  the  said 

route,  without  any  expense  to  the  said school  township, 

other  than  the  pay  agreed  upon  for  the  party  of  the  first  part  in  this 
contract.     (Here  insert  conditions  as  to  stable)* 

3.  The  party  of  the  first  part  is  to  have  control  of  all  the  school 
children  so  hauled  to  and  from  school,  to  keep  order  and  maintain 
discipline  while  in  the  wagon  or  along  the  route,  and  to  treat  all  chil- 
dren in  a  gentlemanly  and  civil  manner  and  to  see  that  no  child  is 
imposed  upon  or  mistreated  while  in  his  charge,  and  shall  use  every 
care  for  the  safety  of  the  children  under  his  charge.  All  school  hacks 
shall  come  to  a  full  stop  immediately  before  crossing  steam  or  electric 
railways  and  the  driver  shall  ascertain  positively  as  to  the  approach 
of  any  danger.  The  party  of  the  first  part  hereby  agrees  to  prevent 
the  use  of  tobacco  in  any  form,  by  himself  or  any  other  person  upon 
the  school  wagon  while  under  his  charge. 

4.  The  party  of  the  first  part  is  to  drive  the  wagon  and  take  the 
children  along  the  route  every  day  that  school  is  in  session  during  the 
school  year  of  19. .  and  19. .. 

5.  The  party  of  the  first  part  shall  inform  the  parents  of  the  school 
children  as  to  the  time  he  will  arrive  at  the  place  where  the  children 
are  to  take  the  school  wagon  each  morning,  so  that  the  children  can 
be  ready  to  get  into  the  wagon  with  the  least  possible  delay.  He  shall 
wait  a  reasonable  length  of  time  for  the  children  in  case  they  are  not 
ready  when  the  wagon  arrives  in  the  morning,  but  he  will  not  be  re- 
quired to  so  wait  over  two  minutes.  Said  party  of  the  first  part  is 
to  use  as  many  horses  as  necessary  to  haul  the  wagon  on  the  schedule 
as  laid  down  in  this  contract.  The  party  of  the  first  part  is  to  per- 
sonally perform  all  the  said  work  as  laid  down  in  this  agreement, 
unless  permission  for  a  substitute  be  given  by  the  trustee,  who  shall 
designate  who  such  substitute  shall  be.  This  contract  shall  not  be 
assigned  to  another  person  to  perform  without  the  written  consent 
of  the  said  township  trustee,  as  party  of  the  second  part,  and  to  be 
so  written  upon  the  back  of  this  contract.  The  party  of  the  first 
part  is  to  wash  and  clean  up  the  wagon  at  end  of  term  and  place  it 
in  the  school  barn,  or  elsewhere,  as  directed  by  the  trustee  without 
extra  compensation. 

6.  Party  of  the  first  part  hereby  agrees  to  make  all  reports  called 
for  by  the  trustee  or  anyone  authorized  by  the  trustee  to  call  for  them. 


222  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL    SCHOOL 

7.  The  party  of  the  second  part  hereby  agrees  to  pay  the  party 

of  the  first  part  the  sum  of dollars  ($ )  per  day 

for  every  day  such  work  is  performed.  Pay  for  such  work  can  only 
be  drawn  each  month  during  school  term  or  at  the  end  of  the  term, 
or  on  the  same  plan  and  terms  as  with  the  school-teachers  if  the 
trustee  so  desires. 

8.  The  wilful  violation  of  any  of  the  provisions  of  this  contract 
shall  be  cause  for  its  forfeiture. 

9.  In  case  anything  should  arise  not  named  or  covered  by  this 
contract,  the  matter  shall  be  adjusted  by  the  township  trustee,  whose 
decision  shall  govern  all  parties  concerned. 

To  all  of  the  above  we  do  hereby  agree  in  every  particular  by 
signing  our  names  on  this,  the day  of 19. . . 


Party  0}  the  First  Part. 


Trustee  of  School  Township,  Randolph  County, 

Ind.,  and  Party  of  the  Second  Part. 

Legislation  Permitting  Transportation  at  Public  Expense. 
— Authority  is  given  to  school  ofliicers  by  the  State  legisla- 
tures in  at  least  44  States  to  expend  public  school  funds  for 
the  transportation  of  children  to  schools,  provided  the  chil- 
dren live  outside  of  a  reasonable  walking  distance.  Such 
authorization  is  necessary  before  large  consoHdated  districts 
can  be  established.  In  certain  States  transportation  at 
public  expense  is  permissive  only,  in  others  obligatory. 
Ohio,  for  instance,  requires  free  transportation  to  be  fur- 
nished to  all  children  living  2  miles  or  more  from  the  school. 
Children  living  nearer  may  be  conveyed  free  at  the  option 
of  the  school  board.  In  Missouri  free  transportation  must 
be  provided  to  children  living  2}4  miles  or  more  from  a  school. 
Colorado  school  districts  may  furnish  free  transportation 
to  children  whose  homes  are  i}i  miles  or  more  away.  The 
consolidated  district  boards  of  Kansas  must  furnish  trans- 
portation to  children  2  miles  or  more  from  school,  those  of 
Oklahoma  to  children  i  }i  miles  or  more  from  school.  Penn- 
sylvania provides  that  ^'no  pupils  of  abandoned  schools 


TRANSPORTATION  OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      223 

shall  be  required  to  walk  more  than  i}4  miles  to  the  new 
school  building."  Indiana  requires  all  schools  with  fewer 
than  12  children  to  be  closed  and  education  for  the  children 
provided  elsewhere.  Children  are  transported  at  public 
expense  to  neighboring  schools.  The  State  has  had  much 
experience,  therefore,  in  transportation,  and  realizes  the 
seriousness  ot  the  problem.  The  Indiana  State  superin- 
tendent of  public  instruction,  in  a  chapter  on  consolidation 
in  his  annual  report  for  191 2,  discusses  it  as  follows: 

The  great  objection  which  must  be  met  in  consolidating  our  rural 
schools  is  transportation.  Many  parents  object,  and  with  good  cause, 
to  the  fact  that  their  children  are  transported  too  great  a  distance 
and  that  they  are  compelled  to  leave  home  too  early  in  the  morning 
and  are  returned  too  late  in  the  evening.  This  demonstrates  that  the 
unit  of  consolidation  is  too  large.  A  readjustment  of  the  consolidated 
area  should  be  made,  and  the  pupils  affected  should  be  transported  a 
reasonable  distance.  In  rural  communities  where  good  roads  cannot 
be  maintained  throughout  the  year  the  people  must  be  content  with 
the  district  school.  Where  the  unit  of  consolidation  is  not  too  large 
transportation  of  pupils  has  made  attendance  larger,  more  regular, 
and  eliminated  tardiness.  Transportation  has  been  a  great  aid  to 
the  health  of  the  children.  They  are  not  compelled  to  walk  through 
the  rain  and  in  the  mud,  wearing  wet  shoes  all  day.  In  the  majority 
of  places  where  we  have  consolidation  the  school  officials  have  been 
very  careful  to  get  responsible  men  as  drivers  of  the  school  wagons. 
Consequently,  the  pupils  are  under  the  care  of  some  responsible  person 
all  day,  and  the  girls  are  protected  on  the  way  to  and  from  school, 
and  the  boys  influenced  from  the  temptation  to  quarrels  and  other 
misconduct. 

The  success  of  the  consolidated  school  depends  in  very  large 
measure  upon  transportation.  If  the  transportation  is  safe,  comforta- 
ble, rapid,  and  in  charge  of  men  of  high  character,  no  troubles  result 
from  it.  When  men  of  low  ideals  are  in  charge  of  transportation  or 
when  transportation  is  slow,  or  when  the  distance  is  too  great,  then 
certain  evils  are  at  once  seen,  and  just  complaint  is  made  against  the 
consolidated  schools.  These  evils,  however,  are  all  remediable.  If 
the  people  demand  drivers  of  high  character  they  can  be  secured. 
If  the  officials  insist  upon  rapidity  of  transportation  that  too  can  be 
done.  None  of  these  evils  in  any  way  affect  the  real  work  of  con- 
solidation. 


224  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

rV.     Transportation  Experience 

To  give  further  concreteness  and  serviceableness  to  our 
discussion  of  this  very  important  phase  of  consolidation, 
we  print  here  by  permission  a  discussion  by  W.  S.  Fogarty, 
county  superintendent  of  Preble  County,  Ohio,  entitled: 
''Transportation  of  School  Children." 

The  Ohio  School  Awakening. — In  the  past  three  years 
Ohio  has  had  an  educational  awakening  which  has  been 
unparalleled.  One  of  the  greatest  opportunities  of  the  new 
county  system  is  that  of  awakening  the  rural  people  to  a 
realization  of  the  condition  of  their  schools  and  the  possi- 
bilities of  improvement.  One  of  the  best  compliments  paid 
me  was  spoken  by  a  very  angry  farmer  because  we  were 
trying  to  consolidate  the  schools  of  his  township,  when  he 
said:  "You  go  around  over  the  county  stirring  up  things." 
The  tragedy  of  the  educational  situation  in  Ohio  was  the 
country  school.  Three  years  ago  as  we  went  over  Preble 
County  and  saw  forlorn  and  dilapidated  one-room  school 
buildings,  with  ill-kept  grounds,  while  just  across  the  road 
could  be  seen  beautiful  homes  with  all  modern  conveniences 
and  fine  barns  for  the  stock,  we  knew  that  the  good  rural 
people  of  this  wealthy  agricultural  county  needed  to  be 
''stirred  up."  The  dismal  one-room,  box-car  type  of  school 
building,  with  the  old,  unsightly  stove  in  the  centre  with  its 
whitewashed  walls,  cross-lights,  window  ventilation,  with 
its  dreary  grounds  and  its  insanitary  condition  in  general,  a 
disgrace  to  the  community,  soon  will  be  only  a  memory  in 
this  county.  Consolidation  is  the  key-note  of  rural-school 
improvement.  In  the  past  three  years  65  one-room  school 
buildings  have  been  abandoned  in  our  county,  and  next 
year  we  expect  to  have  only  25  one-room  schools.  We 
now  have  10  consolidated  schools,  and  next  year  will  see 
another  in  operation.  These  buildings  cost  from  $10,000 
to  $75,000  each,  and  are  modern  in  every  respect.  Our 
purpose  has  been  to  consolidate  in  as  large  areas  as  possi- 
ble, so  that  the  best  high-school  advantages  may  be  given 


TRANSPORTATION   OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      225 

all  the  boys  and  girls.  All  of  our  consolidated-school  dis- 
tricts are  18  to  36  square  miles  in  area,  and  every  one 
maintains  a  three-year  or  a  four-year  high-school  course. 

The  limits  of  this  chapter  do  not  permit  a  discussion  of 
the  value  of  the  consolidated  school  as  to  a  modern  build- 
ing, adequate  equipment,  better  teaching,  larger  socialization 
of  the  community,  better  facilities  for  play,  maintenance  of 
health,  and  a  richer  curriculum.  One  phase  only,  trans- 
portation of  the  children,  will  be  treated. 

The  Routes. — It  is  no  small  problem  to  arrange  the 
routes  in  a  township  to  the  best  advantage.  We  have  found 
that  the  best  plan  is  to  drive  over  every  road  and  find  out 
where  each  pupil  lives,  and  the  number  of  school  children 
in  each  home.  A  plan  of  the  township  is  then  drawn  show- 
ing all  roads,  the  location  of  the  homes,  and  the  number  of 
school  children  in  each.  With  the  plan  and  data  before  one, 
he  can  run  the  routes  to  the  best  advantage.  This  work 
cannot  be  done  quickly,  as  many  trial  routes  must  be  drawn 
before  the  best  plan  for  all  routes  is  found.  Wagon  routes 
should  start  at  the  edge  of  the  consoHdated  area  and  take 
as  direct  route  to  the  central  building  as  possible.  Very 
little,  if  any,  retracing  should  be  done. 

Of  course  the  number  of  routes  in  a  school  district  is  de- 
termined by  the  number  of  children  to  be  carried.  In  our 
county  the  average  number  of  routes  in  a  township  is  twelve. 
A  route  travelled  by  a  school-van  drawn  by  a  team  should 
not  be  over  six  miles  long  from  the  place  where  the  first 
child  enters  the  wagon,  and  if  possible  it  should  be  less. 
Auto  routes  are  sometimes  longer.  We  have  good  gravelled 
roads  with  about  30  miles  of  macadamized  roads.  The 
average  length  of  the  routes  in  our  county  is  5.7  miles.  The 
conveyances  pass  by  nearly  every  home,  so  that  there  are 
very  few  children  who  walk  any  distance.  Children  living 
off  the  pubHc  road  must  meet  the  conveyance.  With  autos 
frequently  two  trips  can  be  made  both  morning  and  eve- 
ning. At  some  Western  schools  the  autos  are  even  using 
''trailers"  to  carry  more  pupils. 


226  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

The  character  of  the  driver  has  much  to  do  with  the 
success  of  transportation.  Only  men  who  are  rehable  are 
employed.  The  profane  or  vulgar,  the  reckless  and  the 
drinker  are  rejected.  Parents  trust  their  children  to  these 
drivers  as  they  do  to  the  care  of  teachers.  Boards  of  educa- 
tion should  use  great  care  in  the  selection  of  both.  A  few 
of  our  drivers  are  trustworthy  young  men  attending  the 
high  school.  On  the  whole  they  prove  to  be  satisfactory; 
yet  all  in  all  we  prefer  reliable  older  men  for  this  service, 
men  who  are  considerate  of  the  welfare  of  their  children, 
and  conscious  of  their  great  responsibility. 

Before  the  war  drivers  were  paid  from  two  dollars  to 
four  dollars  per  day,  depending  on  the  length  and  character 
of  the  route.  The  cost  for  this  service  has  increased  the 
past  year,  and  will  be  more  next  year,  due  to  the  rising  cost 
of  living.  They  are  paid  by  the  day,  and  in  most  cases  are 
not  paid  for  time  lost  when  the  school  is  closed  on  account 
of  epidemics  or  lack  of  coal.  Since  the  fuel  shortage  of  last 
winter  considerable  disagreement  has  arisen  over  the  ques- 
tion of  paying  drivers  when  school  is  closed  for  the  above 
reasons.  The  attorney-general  of  Ohio  has  ruled  that  the 
terms  of  the  contract  determine  what  shall  be  done.  We 
believe  that  drivers  should  be  paid  for  the  days  only  on 
which  service  is  rendered.  Probably  in  time  they  will  be 
paid  as  are  the  teachers,  by  the  year,  and  "whether  school 
keeps  or  not.''  All  of  our  boards  require  drivers  to  give 
bond  for  the  faithful  performance  of  the  contract.  The 
amount  varies  from  $ioo  to  $200.  The  contract  and  bond 
used  in  this  county  are  here  given: 

PREBLE   COUNTY  PUBLIC  SCHOOLS 

Contract 

Transportation  of  Pupils  of  Schools 

Tms  Contract  made  by  and  between  the  Board  of  Education 

of  ,  Preble  County,  Ohio,  party  of  the  first  part,  and 

,  party  of  the  second  part. 


TRANSPORTATION  OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      227 

WITNESSETH,  That  said  party  of  the  second  part  agrees  to  trans- 
port to  and  from  the  Central  School  Building  the  pupils  along  the 
route  known  herein  as  Number for  the  full  school  year,  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  specifications  which  form  a  part  of  this  contract, 

for  the  sum  of  $ per  day,  payable  monthly,  which  sum 

said  party  of  the  first  part  agrees  to  pay  for  services  well  and  truly 
rendered  in  accordance  with  specifications  of  this  contract. 

Specifications 
Said  party  of  the  second  part  agrees 

1.  To  transport  all  pupils  to  and  from  the  Central  Building  along 
Route  No which  route  is  described  as  follows: 

Beginning  at  the  home  of  and  thence  to 

and    thence    to    the    Central    School 

Building. 

2.  To  cause  conveyance  with  pupils  to  start  for  the  Central  School 
Building  not  earlier  than  7.00  A.  M.  Standard  time,  and  arrive  between 
8.00  and  8.20  A.  M. 

3.  To  use  the  conveyance  furnished  by  the  Board  of  Education 
and  to  furnish  a  shelter  for  said  conveyance  and  to  place  the  same 
there  over  night,  or  when  not  in  use. 

4.  To  keep  the  conveyance  clean  and  to  furnish  robes  and  blankets 
to  keep  the  children  comfortable,  and  in  cold  weather  to  keep  con- 
veyance heated. 

5.  To  abstain  absolutely  from  the  use  of  profane  and  immoral 
language,  and  from  the  use  of  tobacco  and  intoxicating  liquors  in  any 
form  and  prevent  others  from  using  them  about  the  conveyance  while 
the  children  are  therein. 

6.  To  provide  a  good  team  of  horses.  Said  team  must  be  gentle 
and  not  afraid  of  cars  and  automobiles,  and  must  be  acceptable  to  the 
party  of  the  first  part. 

7.  To  perform  personally  all  duties  laid  down  in  this  contract, 
unless  permission  for  a  substitute  be  given  by  the  party  of  the  first 
part.  Said  substitute  must  be  acceptable  to  the  party  of  the  first 
part, 

8.  To  exercise  full  control  of  the  children  while  under  his  charge 
and  be  responsible  for  their  conduct. 

9.  To  come  to  a  full  stop  at  each  place  where  children  are  taken 
into  the  conveyance  or  let  out. 


228  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

lo.  To  follow  a  regular  time  schedule  in  driving  the  route. 
II 


President 


Clerk 
Parties  of  the  First  Part 


Party  of  the  Second  Part 
,  Ohio, ,  191 . . 


Bond 

Know  All  Men  by  These  Presents,  That  we 

as  principal  and and as 

sureties  are  held  and  firmly  bound  unto  the  Board  of  Education  of 

,  Preble  County,  Ohio,  in  the  penal  sum 

of  $ for  the  payment  of  which  we  jointly  and  severally 

bind  ourselves. 

The  condition  of  the  above  obligation  is  this:   That   the  said 

has  this  day  entered  into  the  above  contract 

to  transport  pupils  along  Route  No of  said  township  to 

and  from  the  Central  School  Building.     Now  if  the  said 

shall  well  and  truly  perform  the  conditions  of  said  contract, 

on  his  part  to  be  performed,  then  this  obligation  shall  be  void.     Other- 
wise to  remain  in  full  force  and  virtue  in  law. 

Bond   approved   this    day  of    , 

191.... 

Principal 

President  Surety 

Clerk Surety 

The  above  rules  are  for  drivers  of  teams.  Auto  drivers 
have  the  same  rules  modified  to  suit  their  conveyance. 
Transportation  of  children  has  proven  entirely  satisfactory, 
both  as  to  the  safety  of  the  children  and  as  to  the  care  exer- 
cised by  drivers.  Seven  steam  and  electric  railroads  cross 
our  county.  We  have  not  had  an  accident  of  any  kind, 
which  is  remarkable  when  we  remember  that  nearly  1,700 
children  were  transported  to  school  last  year. 


TRANSPORTATION   OF   PUPILS   AT   PUBLIC  EXPENSE      229 
JACKSON  IP..    PREBLE  CO.  OHIO 


TXDWNSHIP   IS  6  Ml  SQUARE 
•i«*CEhiTRAL  SCHOOL 

■  •  ABANDONED  SCHOOL 

■  •  HAMLET 


— >  •  DIRECTION  OF  ROUTE. 

CONV.  NO.  •  STARTING  OF  ROUTE: 

O     •    SCHOOL  CHILDREN 

12  WAGON  S  AND  272  PUPILS. 


MtP  Of  Wagon  Routes  in  a  Typical  Consolidated  Township  of  Preble  County.  OMo 


The  Vehicles. — Most  of  our  91  conveyances  are  horse- 
drawn,  and  are  specially  built  for  school  use.  These  cars 
seem  to  be  as  perfect  cars  as  can  be  constructed.  It  is  a 
great  mistake  to  buy  cheap  school  conveyances.  Good 
school  wagons  cost  from  $200  to  $250.  Most  of  our  wagons 
are  12  feet  long  and  carry  18  to  24  children.  We  demand  a 
vehicle  strong  enough  to  support  the  load  on  any  road,  with 
close-fitting  doors  and  windows  that  will  keep  out  wind  and 
rain,  provision  for  heating  and  ventilating.     In  our  cars  ven- 


230  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

tilation  is  assured  through  overhead  enamelled  ventilators 
which  can  be  adjusted  from  the  inside  and  allow  protection 
to  the  children  from  the  elements.  The  heating  is  done  by- 
heaters  placed  beneath  the  body  of  the  wagon  with  a  regis- 
ter in  the  floor,  by  foot-warmers  or  by  coal-oil  stoves.  With 
blankets  the  wagons  are  always  comfortable  even  in  the 
severest  weather.  Seating  requires  deep-angled  seats  and 
backs  with  leather  upholstery,  and  wide  aisles  between. 
Proper  lighting  is  given  by  glass  windows  all  around.  The 
driver  sits  inside  with  the  children,  supervising  their  con- 
duct. Our  auto  school  cars  are  proving  entirely  satisfac- 
tory, and  several  boards  expect  to  use  this  conveyance  en- 
tirely in  a  short  time.  If  roads  permit,  automobile  trans- 
portation is  preferable.  Motor  transportation  is  quicker, 
equally  reliable,  and  usually  more  economical.  The  chief 
advantage  of  this  method  lies  in  the  quickness  of  the  ser- 
vice. Children  are  on  the  road  about  half  as  long  as  when 
carried  in  wagons.  It  is  usual  for  each  motor-driven  car 
to  make  two  trips — a  long  one  first  and  then  a  short  trip. 
In  the  evening  the  children  Hving  on  the  short  route  are  re- 
turned home  first,  and  those  on  the  long  route  next.  At 
the  Leesport  school  in  Pennsylvania,  the  wide  auto  has 
seats  on  each  side  and  a  double  one  in  the  middle,  thus 
seating  forty  or  more  children.  A  photograph  of  it  is  shown 
in  the  editor's    **  Teaching   Elementary-School   Subjects," 

p.  378. 

Owned  by  the  Community. — All  of  our  conveyances  are 
owned  and  operated  by  the  school  district.  Any  other  plan 
would  surely  invite  disaster.  If  the  driver  furnished  his 
own  van,  naturally  it  would  be  cheap,  as  he  would  want  to 
make  the  greatest  profit  possible,  and,  moreover,  he  does 
not  know  how  long  he  will  hold  the  contract.  Such  a  plan 
would  call  out  strong  protests  from  parents  and  would  cause 
a  condemnation  of  consolidation.  For  the  same  reason  our 
conveyances  are  maintained  by  the  district.  As  soon  as 
repairs  are  needed  they  are  made,  and  our  conveyances  are 


TRANSPORTATION   OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      23 1 

kept  in  good  condition  at  all  times.  However,  it  is  found  by 
experience  that  where  breaks  or  injuries  are  due  to  the  care- 
lessness of  drivers,  the  cost  of  these  repairs  should  be  borne 
by  the  driver.  Some  drivers  are  careless  of  public  property 
and  under  this  plan  breakage  is  greatly  reduced.  The  drivers 
must  house  their  conveyances  when  not  in  use,  and  during 
the  summer  the  wagons  are  stored  in  the  school  barn. 
Superintendent  C.  R.  Coblentz  of  New  Paris,  who  has  been 
unusually  successful  in  working  out  transportation  of  school 
children  in  Jackson  township,  this  county,  says:  ^'With 
proper  care  these  wagons  will  last  a  long  time.  In  Jackson 
township,  some  of  the  wagons  have  been  in  use  now  for 
eight  years.  Two  or  three  have  had  new  sets  of  wheels, 
they  have  been  painted  twice,  I  think,  and  retired  about 
twice.  The  cost  of  maintenance  has  not  been  as  much  as 
was  at  first  anticipated." 

All  of  our  consolidated  schools  except  those  located  in 
villages  have  a  barn  on  the  grounds  to  house  the  horses  and 
the  conveyances.  These  barns  vary  in  size.  A  typical 
barn  is  130  by  40  feet.  Stalls  for  32  horses  are  built  on 
one  side  and  the  other  side  is  left  for  wagons  and  auto- 
mobiles. The  barns  are  well  lighted  and  arranged.  The 
cost  of  a  barn  is  about  $2,500. 

Management. — The  success  of  transportation  depends 
very  largely  upon  its  management.  This  problem  is  largely 
solved  when  we  secure  a  spirit  of  helpful  co-operation 
among  parents,  teachers,  drivers,  and  children.  Definite, 
sensible  rules  must  be  formulated.  The  rules  for  drivers 
are  given  above  in  the  contract.  Drivers  should  under- 
stand that  they  are  working  under  the  direction  of  the  super- 
intendent and  that  all  rules  are  subject  to  reasonable  modi- 
fication by  the  board  of  education. 

Rules  for  children  should  be  printed  and  distributed 
among  the  parents.  Children  while  in  the  conveyance  must 
be  subject  to  a  wise  disciplinary  power  exercised  by  the 
driver.     This  discipline,  however,  must  always  be  under  the 


232  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

guidance  and  control  of  the  superintendent.  A  few  neces- 
sary rules  for  children  are:  To  be  seated  in  the  conveyance 
where  placed  by  the  driver,  to  refrain  from  all  profane  and 
indecent  language  or  actions,  to  be  respectful  to  persons 
whom  they  meet  or  pass  on  the  road,  to  never  get  into  or 
out  of  the  conveyance  while  it  is  in  motion,  to  neither  leave 
nor  enter  the  conveyance  except  with  consent  of  the  driver, 
and  to  know  when  the  conveyance  is  due  and  be  ready  for 
it.  Penalties  for  disobedience  should  be  fixed  by  the  super- 
intendent. The  right  kind  of  consultation  with  parents 
nearly  always  secures  their  co-operation. 

One  boy  in  one  of  our  townships  persisted  in  not  being 
ready  when  the  wagon  arrived,  causing  quite  a  Httle  delay. 
The  superintendent  instructed  the  driver  not  to  wait.  The 
next  morning  the  boy  did  some  yelling  when  the  wagon 
drove  on  and  he  was  left  for  the  day.     He  was  cured. 

Teachers  should  assist  pupils  in  getting  on  their  wraps 
and  in  doing  whatever  is  necessary  to  be  ready  to  leave 
school  on  time.  Teachers  should  send  pupils  to  the  toilets 
before  starting  home,  and  parents  should  be  equally  thought- 
ful mornings.  They  both  should  talk  to  their  children 
about  their  conduct  in  the  conveyances. 

Parents  should  co-operate  with  drivers  and  teachers  in 
having  their  children  ready  on  time  and  insist  that  their 
conduct  in  conveyances  be  proper.  Parents  are  duty  bound 
to  have  a  friendly  and  helpful  attitude  toward  the  whole 
system. 

Definite  time  schedules  are  arranged.  Our  contract 
with  drivers  of  wagons  requires  them  not  to  take  on  the 
first  child  before  seven  o'clock  standard  time,  which  is 
twenty-two  minutes  slower  than  sun  time.  The  above 
time  is  that  which  we  had  before  the  government  ordered 
the  clocks  moved  up  one  hour.  For  shorter  wagon  routes 
and  automobile  routes  the  time  of  starting  is  later.  Con- 
veyances should  not  vary  in  time  of  starting  regardless  of 
roads  and  weather.     It  is  better  that  the  opening  of  schools 


CONSOLIDATED     SCHOOLS    IN 
PREBLE    COUNTY    OHIO 


JEFFERSON 


♦55.000  BLO6 
414  PUPILS 


MONROE 

■fsCOOO  BLDC 
554  PUPJW 


2.000  BLDG 
PUPILS  7Z 


JIS2.0 
j  195 


m 


JACKSON 


tiOiOOO  6LD0. 
tli  PUPILS 


WASHING 


THE  COUNTY  SEAT 


DIXON 

|4C\00O  &LDG 
203    PUPILS 


CA 


LANIER 

■ 

I40.000  euxi 

510  PUPILS 


*IO.OOO  BLDCl 
112  PUPILS 


f  dO.OOO    BLDG. 
JfcO  PUPILS 


225  PUPILS 


ISRAEL 


m 


CAMDEN 


GRATIS 


^10000  8L06 
150  PUPILS 


^20,000  BlM. 
152  PUPIp 


la  TOWNSHIPS  -  EACH    6 Ml.  SQUARE   EXCEPT   THE  TWO  !N  THE  CENTER 
SHAPED  PART  IS  NOT  CONSOLIDATED    ■'CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL  ^-VILLAGE 


Map  of  Preble  County,  Ohio,  showing  Consolidated  Schools 


234 


THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 


should  be  delayed  a  few  minutes  than  for  conveyances  to 
be  irregular  in  time  of  starting.  Every  parent  should  have 
a  time  schedule  at  home  showing  exactly  when  the  con- 
veyance is  due  to  arrive  at  his  home.  Many  conveyances 
in  this  county  run  so  regularly  that  they  are  not  more  than 
two  or  three  minutes  off  schedule  for  many  weeks  at  a  time. 
The  average  time  in  this  county  for  driving  a  horse-drawn 
van  a  mile  is  thirteen  minutes.  When  the  roads  are  heavy 
it  takes  two  to  five  minutes  longer.  With  this  data  it  is 
not  difficult  for  parents  to  calculate  closely  the  time  of 
arrival  of  the  conveyance  in  any  kind  of  weather.  During 
the  short  days  of  winter  the  noon  recess  is  shortened  and  the 
children  are  started  home  at  3.15  p.m.  Data  that  may 
prove  suggestive  are  submitted  herewith. 


No.  of 
convey- 
ances 

Children 
carried 

Av.  length 
of  routes 

Av.  time  to 
drive  routes 

Av.  cost 
per  child 

Camden 

Dixon . 

II 

II 

6 

8 

12 
12 
13 
15 

3 

213 
189 
107 
120 
215 

239 
242 

323 
41 

5.  miles 
6.6  miles 
4.6  miles 

6.  miles 
5 . 4  miles 
6 . 2  miles 
5.4  miles 
6.8  miles 
5.6  miles 

ihr. 

I  hr.  28  min. 

ihr. 

I  hi".  17  min. 

I  hr.  12  min. 

I  hr.  12  min. 

I  hr.  17  min. 

I  hr.  28  min. 

I  hr.    3  min. 

$  .153 
.177 
.132 
.185 
•139 
.15 
.156 
.156 
•25 

Gratis 

Israel 

Jarkson  

JefiFerson 

Lanier 

Monroe 

West  Elkton  . . . 

Total 

91 

1,689 

5.7  miles 

I  hr.  13  min. 
Average  for 
the  County 

$  .166 

V.    Conclusions 

Advantages. — When  consolidation  is  first  broached  in  a 
community,  it  is  found  that  conveyance  of  the  children  is 
responsible  for  much  of  the  opposition.  Many  will  not 
investigate  communities  where  the  system  has  proved  a 


TRANSPORTATION  OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      235 

success,  others  fail  to  see  the  numerous  advantages  of  the 
larger  rural  school  which  can  be  secured  only  by  conveying 
the  children.  Where  consolidation  has  been  tried  a  few- 
years  90  to  95  per  cent  of  the  patrons  give  it  their  hearty 
support.  Before  the  system  is  tried  there  are  many  wild 
statements  about  never  seeing  your  children  in  daylight, 
teams  running  away,  and  trains  crashing  into  vans,  etc. 
Our  answer  is  that  these  disasters  don't  happen.  Of  course 
no  sensible  person  expects  perfection  in  a  system  that  in- 
volves so  many  persons  and  conditions.  A  careful  superin- 
tendent in  possession  of  the  facts  should  have  Kttle  trouble 
in  starting  a  consohdated  school. 

The  health  of  children  is  provided  for  better  when  they 
are  carried  to  school.  The  children  come  to  school  in  con- 
veyances which  are  well  ventilated,  heated,  and  lighted. 
Their  clothing  and  feet  are  dry.  They  are  not  exposed  to 
wind,  snow,  and  rain.  The  larger  school  building  is  properly 
heated,  ventilated,  and  lighted.  Those  of  us  who  attended 
the  one-room  country  school  remember  how  we  trudged 
through  snow,  mud,  and  rain,  and  sat  in  a  poorly  heated 
room  until  feet  and  clothing  were  dry.  Our  experience  is 
that  there  is  less  sickness  in  the  consolidated  school  than 
there  is  in  the  one-room  school. 

Transportation  is  an  advantage  in  taking  care  of  morals. 
Children  carried  in  wagons  have  no  opportunity  of  fighting 
or  hearing  bad  language  on  the  way  to  and  from  school. 
One  of  the  greatest  difficulties  of  teachers  of  one-room  schools 
is  the  behavior  of  children  on  the  way  to  school  and  home. 
While  under  the  care  of  the  driver  there  is  no  misbehavior. 
In  the  consolidated-school  building  the  toilet-rooms  are  kept 
in  the  best  condition.  Every  parent  knows  that  satisfac- 
tory conditions  in  such  matters  is  of  vital  importance. 

To  convey  children  to  school  makes  the  attendance  far 
better.  Hear  what  one  farmer  says:  "Think  of  the  Kttle 
children  plodding  schoolward  in  cold  and  wet  and  mire — 
when  they  go  at  all!    Then  count  up  the  number  of  days 


236  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

they  are  kept  home  altogether  because  of  bad  roads  and 
severe  weather!  "  Read  what  the  records  show  in  one  town- 
ship of  this  county  the  next  year  after  the  schools  were  con- 
solidated. ''The  consolidated  system  of  managing  the 
schools  showed  many  improvements  over  the  old  way.  One 
of  these  was  in  attendance.  The  attendance  the  last  year 
of  the  rural  schools  was  81  per  cent,  while  this  year  it  was 
92  per  cent — an  increase  of  11  per  cent.  Another  was  in 
regard  to  tardiness.  During  the  last  year  of  the  rural  schools 
in  one  month  in  one  of  the  schools  there  were  ^^  cases  of 
tardiness.  This  year,  under  the  consolidated  system,  we 
had  scarcely  that  number  for  the  entire  year."  Who  can 
figure  the  value  of  such  an  increase  in  attendance  and  punc- 
tuality? 

Those  who  are  sceptical  should  visit  a  consolidated  school 
and  see  the  interest  on  the  part  of  the  children.  Why  do 
so  many  boys  and  girls  drop  out  of  the  one-room  school  be- 
fore completing  the  work  ?  The  answer  is:  Few  or  no  play- 
mates of  the  same  age  and  sex,  school  work  mostly  memory 
work  and  from  the  book,  not  enough  attention  from  the 
overworked  teacher — witness  the  carved  desks  in  the  coun- 
try schools — unattractive  building  and  grounds,  and  no 
high-school  provision.  The  school  should  be  a  pleasant 
place.  The  attractive  building,  good  equipment,  pupils  of 
the  same  age  for  games,  and  time  for  study  of  things  as  well 
as  books  make  the  consolidated  school  a  place  of  interest  to 
boys  and  girls.  The  organized  athletics,  Hterary  and  music 
work,  and  social  Hfe  of  such  a  school  have  a  large  influence 
in  creating  interest  and  securing  the  best  educational  results. 

These  suggestions  from  Ohio  experience  should  make 
plain  the  details  to  take  into  consideration  in  providing 
transportation  in  any  State.  A  point  to  remember  is  that 
transportation  not  only  requires  good  roads  but  that  it 
brings  them.  The  community  meetings  and  larger  view 
will  soon  secure  good  roads.  We  may  collect  some  of  the 
main  principles  in  the  following: 


TRANSPORTATION  OF  PUPILS  AT  PUBLIC  EXPENSE      237 


SUMMARY 

1.  Many  consolidated  schools  with  from  3  to  6  or  more  teachers  could 

be  established  in  the  eastern  half  of  the  United  States  in  dis- 
tricts of  approximately  nine  square  miles,  for  which  public  trans- 
portation would  not  be  necessary. 

2.  In  districts  large  enough  so  that  transportation  must  be  furnished, 

too  great  care  in  its  arrangement  cannot  be  exercised.  Unsatis- 
factory transportation  will  cause  constant  dissatisfaction  with 
the  school. 

3.  Dissatisfaction  always  results  if  routes  are  too  long.     No  route 

should  be  longer  than  can  be  covered  under  average  conditions 
in  an  hour,  or  better,  45  minutes,  the  transportation  wagon  or 
automobile  travelling  on  a  fixed  schedule. 

4.  In  order  that  safe,  comfortable,  suitable  wagons  and  automobiles 

shall  be  used,  they  should  be  purchased  by  and  remain  the  prop- 
erty of  the  school  district. 

5.  The  driver  must  be  a  reliable  person,  able  and  willing  to  keep  dis- 

cipline in  his  wagon,  and  have  the  same  power  to  do  so  as  is  given 
to  teachers  in  the  school  building. 

6.  Transportation  cannot  wait  for  good  roads;  the  two  come  together. 

Wherever  the  roads  are  so  bad  that  it  is  not  possible  to  furnish 
transportation,  they  are  certainly  too  bad  to  ask  children  to  walk. 

7.  Transportation  to  public  schools  has  been  furnished  in  the  United 

States  for  over  40  years.  It  can  be  made  entirely  satisfactory 
from  every  standpoint.  Wherever  it  has  not  been  satisfactory, 
the  fault  has  been  the  school  directors  who  failed  to  make  proper 
arrangement  for  it.  It  causes  better  attendance,  it  keeps  chil- 
dren out  of  mischief  on  the  way  to  and  from  school,  and  it  is 
safe.  Very  few  accidents  have  ever  happened  to  children  in 
school  wagons. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  Secure  or  make  a  good  map  of  your  county,  or  a  part  of  it,  and 

locate  the  best  sites  for  consolidated  schools. 

2.  Trace  the  transportation  routes  of  each  vehicle.     Plan  for  auto- 

mobiles if  they  are  feasible. 

3.  What  are  the  best  types  of  modern  roads  for  your  county,  and  by 

what  procedure  are  they  obtained? 

4.  Is  the  supervision  of  pupils  in  the  transportation  van  less  im- 

portant than  on  the  playground,  in  the  classroom,  or  at  home  ? 
What  virtues  may  be  cultivated  in  pupils  by  efficient  drivers? 


238  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

5.  Should  pupils  with  homes  far  from  the  routes  be  encouraged  to 

build  waiting  shelter-houses  at  the  roadside,  or  are  these  un- 
necessary ? 

6.  How  should  a  school  be  built  to  provide  for  loading  and  unloading 

pupils  without  exposure? 

7.  Are  parents  ever  paid  for  the  transportation  of  their  own  children  ? 

Is  this  desirable? 

8.  Could  the  repair  of  the  transportation  automobiles  be  profitably 

undertaken  by  high-school  pupils  as  a  phase  of  science  or  voca- 
tional work? 

9.  Cite  any  instances  of  the  use  of  transportation  hacks  being  used 

for  the  carrying  of  patrons  to  social-centre  events  in  the  evenings. 
Is  this  feasible? 
10.  What  types  of  school  transportation  have  failed  to  give  success  ? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Monahan — "Consolidation    of    Schools    and    Transportation    of 

Pupils  at  Public  Expense.'*     Government  Printing  Office. 

2.  Betts  and  Hall— "Better  Rural  Schools."     Bobbs-Merrill  Co. 

3.  Arp — "Rural  Education  and  the  Consolidated  School."     World 

Book  Co. 

4.  Monroe — "Cyclopedia  of  Education."     Macmillan. 

5.  Cubberley — "Rural  Life  and  Education."     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

6.  Bulletins  on  transportation  and  consolidation  published  by  various 

State  departments  of  education. 


CHAPTER  XII 
METHODS  AND   FACTS  OF  CONSOLIDATION 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  is  a  satisfactory  cost  for  a  first-class  consolidated  school,  with 

auditorium,  gymnasium,  laboratories,  and  necessary  workrooms 
for  about  three  hundred  elementary  and  high-school  pupils  ? 

2.  How  can  the  community  be  brought  to  wish  and  to  will  the  con- 

solidated-school plan  into  existence? 

3.  What  is  the  cost  of  transportation  of  pupils  per  day  and  per  pupil? 

4.  How  does  this  cost  compare  with  the  cost  of  running  a  one-room 

school  ? 

5.  What  would  it  cost  in  a  consolidation  area  to  provide  first-class 

one-room  schools,  and  how  does  this  combined  cost  compare  with 
that  of  a  first-class  consolidated-school  plant? 

6.  Relate  the  methods  used  in  accomplishing  consolidation  in  a  par- 

ticular instance  of  which  you  have  direct  or  indirect  knowledge. 

I.    In  Preble  County,  Ohio 

A  Campaign  for  Consolidation. — The  great  school  code 
of  Ohio  became  a  law  in  19 14.  The  corner-stone  of  this 
excellent  new  school  code  is  compulsory  county  and  district 
supervision. 

Some  conditions  before  the  consolidation  movement 
began  in  Preble  County  were:  a  wealthy  agricultural  county 
with  good  roads,  seven  villages  with  modern  schools,  many 
poor  *' box-car,"  one-room  buildings  in  rural  districts,  and 
only  one  of  the  townships  with  full-time  supervision. 

Six  district  superintendents  giving  full  time  to  supervi- 
sion, and  all  in  favor  of  consolidation,  assisted  me.  Our  aim 
was  to  improve  the  rural  schools  of  the  county.  Believing 
that  the  strategic  point  in  this  movement  is  consolidation, 
we  began  our  campaign.^iSS^  planned  to  consolidate  as 


V     ^^^        / 


240  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

large  areas  as  possible,  and  in  no  case  has  the  territory  con- 
solidated been  less  than  one-half  of  a  congressional  town- 
ship. If  a  village  was  located  right,  the  rural  district  about 
and  the  village  were  consolidated. 

In  conducting  our  campaign  we  had  a  general  plan,  but 
it  varied  to  suit  the  local  conditions.  First  we  sought  the 
help  of  the  school  officials,  the  teachers,  and  some  influen- 
tial patrons.  Elections  were  called  upon  petition  of  the 
people,  and  not  by  the  county  board  of  education,  nor  the 
local  board  of  education.  This  method  has  two  advan- 
tages: first,  the  movement  apparently  comes  from  the 
people,  and  second,  those  who  carry  the  petition  become 
active  supporters,  and  also  learn  who  favor  and  who  oppose. 
Both  consohdation  and  issuance  of  bonds  were  submitted 
at  the  same  election.  This  method  saves  the  expense  of 
two  elections. 

Our  policy  was  to  conduct  an  educational  campaign  for 
about  ten  days  immediately  preceding  the  election.  The 
people  must  be  shown  the  advantages.  Of  course,  we  have 
those  who  will  not  be  shown;  some  who  wish  to  keep  taxes 
to  the  lowest  limit,  who  believe  that  the  cheap  school  is  the 
best;  and  some  who  have  so  much  sentiment  for  the  "little 
red  schoolhouse"  that  they  can  endure  no  change.  Both 
superintendents  and  interested  patrons  got  out  and  did 
personal  work  from  house  to  house.  Some  of  the  campaigns 
were  so  organized  that  no  voter  was  missed.  A  card  index 
was  made,  and  every  voter's  name  was  Hsted  upon  a  card. 
If  he  was  doubtful,  he  received  several  different  calls.  We 
converted  some  farmers  in  the  corn-field. 

Public  meetings  were  held  in  the  schoolhouses.  These 
meetings  were  advertised,  and  in  almost  every  instance  drew 
a  good  crowd  of  interested  men  and  women.  Two  speakers 
were  assigned  to  each  meeting.  We  used  superintendents, 
available  men  from  the  State  Department,  and  patrons. 
The  people  were  invited  to  ask  questions  and  to  take  part 
in  the  discussions.     Some  lively  meetings  were  held. 


METHODS  AND  FACTS   OF  CONSOLIDATION  24I 

About  two  days  before  election  we  mailed  every  voter 
a  bulletin  which  contained  a  cut  and  description  of  the  pro- 
posed building,  gave  some  of  the  advantages  of  consolida- 
tion, and  furnished  financial  data  to  show  that  they  could 
build  and  consoHdate  their  schools.  Sometimes  we  sent  a 
personal  letter  to  each  voter.  We  believe  these  circulars 
had  great  influence. 

Jackson  township,  shown  on  page  229,  had  been  central- 
ized with  great  success  for  four  years.  The  transportation 
problem  there  had  been  worked  out  to  entire  satisfaction. 
We  made  good  use  of  this  example  in  our  propaganda. 

To  secure  consolidation  we  stressed  these  advantages: 
A  modern  building,  adequate  equipment,  better  teaching, 
larger  socialization  of  the  community,  better  facilities  for 
play,  and  a  good  high  school  for  all. 

Good  Results. — Consolidation  became  the  fashion  in  our 
county,  and  the  epidemic  helped  us.  Ten  elections  were 
held  within  five  months.  Eight  new  school  buildings  were 
constructed  within  two  years;  the  ninth  has  recently  been 
completed.  These  school  buildings  cost  from  $10,000  to 
$60,000  each,  and  their  total  cost  is  $371,000.     See  page  233. 

Eleven  consolidated  schools  in  this  county  are  giving 
the  children  the  best  advantages  of  a  modern  education. 
These  schools  make  for  efficiency  by  division  of  labor,  they 
provide  for  maintaining  good  health,  they  offer  opportuni- 
ties for  good  science  work  through  their  laboratories,  they 
provide  ample  grounds  and  equipment  for  play,  and  through 
the  auditorium  they  make  possible  good  community  work. 

Significant  Facts. — The  following  data  are  taken  from 
this  year's  annual  report  of  the  schools  in  Preble  County: 

Before  Con-       Since  Con- 
County  solidation  solidation        Increase 
1914  1917 

School  property $374,925  $601,120  60% 

Volumes  in  school  libraries 14,881  20,836  40% 

Enumeration  of  school  youth 5, 13 5  5j076  less 

Total  enrolment 4,374  4,508  3% 


Before  Con- 

Since Con- 

solidation 

solidation 

Increase 

1914 

1017 

523 

698 

33% 

108 

52 

less 

92 

34 

less 

I 

II 

1100% 

10 

91 

900% 

16 

63 

400% 

112 

122 

9% 

i68 

28s 

70% 

242  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

County 

Enrolment  in  high  schools 

School  buildings  used 

One-room  schools  in  use 

Consolidated  schools  with  high  school 

Wagons  carrying  children 

Teachers  graduates  of  college  or  nor- 
mal   

High-school  graduates 

Eighth-grade  graduates 

Domestic  Science  and  Manual  Training 

Before  Con-     Since  Con- 
solidation       solidation       Increase 
1914  1917 

Pupils  in  domestic-science  work 121  392        224% 

Manual  training 61  155        154% 

EXfflBITS  AT  THE  CoUNTY  FaIR 

1914  1917 

Value  of  exhibits $25  $800 

Educational  hall  provided No  Yes 

Annual  County  Play  Day 

Before  Con-       Since  Con- 
solidation        solidation 
1914  1917 

People  present None  3,000 

Entries None  1,494 

Different  pupils  entered None  524 

Transfers  of  Territory  by  County  Board 
About  58  square  miles. 


One  village. 
Two  townships. 


Districts  Dissolved 


Interschool  Contests 


Baseball,  football,  basket-baU. 
Literary  and  music,  spelling. 


METHODS  AND  FACTS   OF  CONSOLIDATION 


243 


Play-grounds 

Landscaped  and  part  of  them  planted. 
Play  apparatus  provided. 


Teaching 

Consolidation  of  schools  is  giving  us  better-trained  and  more  ex- 
perienced teachers,  with  a  longer  tenure  of  position.  These  teachers 
working  together  have  all  the  advantages  of  close  association  that 
comes  from  frequent  teachers'  meetings,  and  also  the  advantage  of 
close  supervision. 


Teachers  who  are  college  graduates . 
Teachers  who  are  normal  graduates . 
Graduates  of  first-grade  high  school 

One-year  certificates 

Three-year  certificates 


Before  Con- 

Since Con- 

solidation 

solidation 

1914 

1917 

13 

28 

3 

35 

98 

124 

89 

52 

16 

S6 

High-School  Education 

Before  Con- 
solidation 
1914 

High-school  enrolment  in  county 523 

Lanier  township 22 

Jackson  township 32 

Monroe  township 27 


Since  Con- 

solidation 

Increase 

1917 

698 

33% 

44 

100% 

65 

100% 

71 

163% 

Startling  High-School  Facts 

Washington  inrtcon 

Graduates — eighth  grades  in  last  4  years 80  60 

Number  of  them  in  high  school 33  55 

Per  cent  going  to  high  school 41  91 

Careful  investigation  by  many  able  men,  as  stated  above,  proves 
that  every  day  of  a  boy's  high-school  education  is  worth  more  than 
$10.  Then  the  loss  to  Washington  township  every  year  is  (47  pupils 
at  $10  per  day  for  160  days)  $75,200.  The  money  loss  in  this  town- 
ship every  year  is  astounding.  The  loss  in  happiness  and  success 
in  life  is  a  tragedy. 


244  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Boys'  and  Girls'  Club  Work 
14  clubs. 
200  members. 
3  boys  and  i  girl  sent  to  Washington,  D.  C. 
I  boy  and  2  girls  sent  for  a  week  at  State  university. 
$68  in  cash  prizes  distributed. 

School  Community  Meetings 
January  i,  1917-June  i,  1917 

Lanier  Tp.  S°r^n 

(ConsoUdated)      (Not^Con- 

Attendance 2,625  890 

Money  raised $225.90  $3.75 

Jackson  Tp.       ^^^i^g?"* 
'         (ConsoUdated)  cdSl^dltLi) 

Attendance 2,833  657 

Money  raised $183.20         $10.30 

Cost 

Subdist. 

Monroe  Tp.     ^"'JiTf''" 
(ConsoUdated)  (-^.cn^^ii. 

dated) 

Average  annual   cost  for   tuition  and   trans- 
portation       $37.62         $50.90 

Somers  Tp.        Somen  Tp. 
(Before  Con-     (Since  Con- 
solidation)      solidation) 

Average  daily  attendance 81%  92% 

Money  spent  for  education  is  an  investment  in  boys  and 
girls.  Men  are  investing  more  in  wheat-sowing  that  they 
may  reap  larger  harvests,  and  they  are  putting  more  money 
into  the  housing,  feeding,  and  breeding  of  stock  that  larger 
returns  may  be  attained.  Our  cities  and  more  progressive 
villages  are  making  very  large  investments  in  the  education 
of  their  boys  and  girls,  beheving  that  no  money  spent  for 
the  public  brings  such  large  returns  as  that  invested  in  edu- 
cation. It  is  common  knowledge  that  the  farmers  of  Preble 
County   are   very   prosperous.     Is   there   any   good   cause 


METHODS  AND  FACTS   OF   CONSOLIDATION  245 

why  they  should  not  have  the  best  modern  school  for  their 
children  ? 

The  country  can  produce  its  share  of  socially  efficient 
men  and  women  best  by  providing  the  best  kind  of  school. 
The  consolidated  school  as  it  will  inevitably  be  developed  is 
this  school.  Some  of  the  advantages  as  given  in  my  recent 
annual  report  are  as  follows: 

II.    Advantages  of  the  Consolidated  School 

Building. — Who  can  measure  the  uplifting  influence 
upon  the  child  who  for  twelve  years  goes  to  school  in  one  of 
our  beautiful  modern  consolidated  school  buildings  instead 
of  going  to  a  dreary  one- room  school  building  ?  The  school- 
house  should  be  the  best  building  in  the  community  and 
should  meet  the  requirements  of  a  modern  school.  Such 
a  building  in  this  twentieth  century  must  consist  of  more 
than  one  room.  Our  cities  and  villages  have  fine  buildings 
constructed  to  carry  on  the  work  in  education  of  the  age 
in  which  we  live.  There  is  something  wrong  with  a  com- 
munity where  you  find  the  average  barn  more  commodious 
and  better  fitted  for  the  purpose  for  which  it  was  built  than 
is  the  schoolhouse.  What  is  said  in  Chapter  IX  and  the 
final  chapter  of  the  volume  points  the  way  to  an  ideal 
consolidated-school  building. 

Health. — Our  new  buildings  have  regard  for  the  eyesight 
of  pupils,  providing  for  better  lighting  than  in  one-room 
schools.  The  consolidated  school  has  a  modern  system  of 
distributing  heat  evenly  over  the  building.  Even  yet  in 
this  progressive  county  one  may  see  in  one-room  schools 
some  children  roasting  near  the  unjacketed  stove  and  some 
freezing  near  the  windows.  Our  new  buildings  have  excel- 
lent systems  of  ventilation  by  which  air  is  supplied  continu- 
ously. The  one-room  school  was  constructed  without  any 
provision  for  ventilation.  The  consolidated  school  employs 
a  janitor  who  keeps  the  building  clean.     The  children  come 


246  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

to  school  in  wagons  that  are  wanned  arid  ventilated.  Their 
clothing  and  feet  are  dry.  They  are  not  exposed  to  wind, 
snow,  and  rain.  The  health  of  our  children  should  be  of 
prime  importance  and  we  should  give  large  attention  to 
their  welfare  in  the  school  building. 

Morals. — In  the  new  school  buildings  toilet- rooms  are 
kept  in  the  best  condition.  Every  thoughtful  parent  knows 
that  satisfactory  conditions  in  this  matter  are  highly  desira- 
ble. Children  carried  in  wagons  have  no  opportunity  of 
fighting  nor  hearing  bad  language  on  the  way  to  and  from 
school.  One  of  the  greatest  difficulties  of  teachers  of  one- 
room  schools  is  the  behavior  of  children  on  the  way  to  school 
and  home.  The  question  of  morals  is  of  vital  importance 
to  all. 

Beauty. — The  beautiful  has  always  been  associated  with 
the  good,  and  the  ugly  with  the  bad.  The  question  of  beauty 
never  entered  into  the  construction  of  the  old  *' box-car'' 
one-room  school  building.  To-day  people  are  building  more 
beautiful  houses,  barns,  and  school  buildings.  The  archi- 
tectural beauty  of  our  new  school  buildings  and  their  well- 
landscaped  grounds  will  prove  to  be  silent  and  powerful 
forces  influencing  the  characters  of  the  boys  and  girls. 

Teachers. — While  there  are  many  good  one-room  schools 
and  some  capable  and  experienced  teachers  are  working 
therein  and  doing  their  best  for  the  children  under  their 
charge,  yet  the  fact  is  that  a  large  per  cent  of  the  teachers 
of  this  class  are  inexperienced  and  are  poorly  equippec?. 
Teachers  of  experience  and  training  leave  the  one-roor.i 
school  because  of  lack  of  association  with  other  teachers, 
and  because  there  are  so  many  grades  and  classes.  The 
teachers  in  a  centralized  school  form  a  congenial,  happy 
group.  By  meeting  every  day  and  through  discussion  of 
mutual  problems  they  stimulate  one  another  to  the  best 
efforts.  Having  one  or  two  grades,  they  become  efficient 
in  that  line  of  work.  This  is  an  age  of  specialists,  and  no 
teacher  should  teach  more  than  two,  or  at  the  most  three 


METHODS  AND  FACTS  OF   CONSOLIDATION  247 

grades.  Children  of  different  ages  need  different  methods 
of  instruction  and  leadership  and  should  have  teachers 
specially  prepared  for  certain  grades.  In  the  consolidated 
school,  the  teacher  of  the  primary  grades  is  chosen  because 
she  is  naturally  fitted  to  teach  little  children;  the  teacher  of 
the  upper  grades  because  he  is  equipped  as  a  leader  of 
boys  and  girls.  The  increased  value  of  the  teaching  is  un- 
told. No  teacher  with  eight  grades  and  the  enlarged  cur- 
riculum demanded  in  this  age  can  do  effective  work. 

Class  Work. — The  larger  school  means  larger  classes. 
One  of  the  most  important  things  in  the  education  of  the 
child  is  to  come  in  contact  with  children  of  his  own  age. 
In  many  one-room  schools  this  stimulating  influence  is  en- 
tirely lost.  One  may  see  class  after  class  called  up  with 
only  one  or  two  pupils.  Such  children  are  very  unfortunate. 
Ten  to  thirty  pupils  in  a  class  is  far  better.  In  the  one-room 
school  the  teacher  has  twenty  to  thirty  classes  a  day  and 
has  from  five  to  fifteen  minutes  for  a  recitation.  In  our 
larger  schools  the  teacher  has  one  or  two  grades  and  the 
recitation  will  be  twenty  to  thirty  minutes  in  length.  In 
the  one-room  school  of  eight  grades  the  teacher  gives  one- 
eighth  of  her  time  to  your  child,  while  in  the  centralized 
school  she  gives  one-half  or  all  of  her  time  to  your  child. 
This  fact  alone  justifies  the  new  plan  of  giving  better  schools 
to  the  country  children. 

Curriculum. — The  one-room  school  has  an  overworked 
teacher,  too  many  classes,  and  no  laboratory  facilities.  The 
consolidated  school  has  teachers  qualified  for  the  special 
work  required  by  a  modern  curriculum,  has  fewer  classes 
and  longer  recitations,  and  has  good  laboratories.  One  of 
the  great  faults  of  the  one-room  school  is  the  predominance 
of  memory  work  taken  from  the  text-book.  The  fault  is 
caused  by  too  many  classes  and  an  overworked  teacher. 
In  the  consolidated  school  there  is  opportunity,  not  alone 
to  teach  text-book  facts,  but  to  take  up  such  subjects  as 
will  acquaint  the  child  with  his  environment.     He  will  learn 


248  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

something  of  the  great  laws  of  nature.  The  boys  and  girls 
who  are  to  mould  the  rural  life  of  the  next  generation  are 
in  the  rural  school  to-day,  and  most  of  them  will  go  directly 
from  this  school  to  their  life's  work.  Agriculture,  domestic 
science,  and  manual  training  cannot  be  taught  successfully 
in  a  one-room  school.  In  the  new  schools  the  old  funda- 
mentals will  not  be  neglected,  but  a  new  emphasis  will  be 
placed  upon  them.  Education  now  is  not  thought  of  as 
mere  culture  or  discipline  of  the  mind.  To-day  it  includes 
these  and  more.  It  deals  more  with  practical  concrete  sub- 
jects and  prepares  for  vocational  life.  The  centralized 
school  teaches  the  ^*  three  R's"  better,  gives  more  culture  and 
discipline,  and  also  offers  the  opportunity  for  study  of  farm 
crops,  the  farm  stock,  and  the  farm  home.  For  ages  agri- 
culture has  been  thought  of  as  an  art  only,  but  it  is  a  sci- 
ence and  a  business  as  well.  Home-making  and  agricul- 
ture are  the  biggest  vocations  in  our  country  and  they  in- 
volve more  complicated  problems  than  do  any  other  two 
vocations.  The  influence  of  the  centralized  school  in  offer- 
ing a  more  practical  and  interesting  curriculum  cannot  be 
estimated. 

Interest. — Those  who  are  sceptical  should  visit  a  con- 
solidated school  and  see  the  interest  on  the  part  of  the  chil- 
dren. Why  do  so  many  boys  and  girls  drop  out  of  the  one- 
room  school  before  completing  the  work?  The  answer  is: 
Few  or  no  playmates  of  the  same  age  and  sex,  school  work 
mostly  memory  work  and  from  the  book,  not  enough  at- 
tention from  the  overworked  teacher — witness  the  carved 
desks  in  the  country  schools — unattractive  building  and 
grounds,  and  no  high-school  provision.  The  school  ought 
to  be  a  pleasant  place.  The  attractive  building,  good  equip- 
ment, pupils  of  same  age  for  games,  and  time  for  study  of 
things  as  well  as  books  make  the  consolidated  school  a 
place  of  interest  to  boys  and  girls.  The  organized  athletics, 
literary  and  music  work,  and  social  life  of  such  a  school 
have  a  large  influence  in  creating  interest  and  securing  the 
best  educational  results. 


A  start  toward  farm  carpentry 


Bird  houses  constructed  in  Preble  County  schools,  Ohio 


METHODS  AND  FACTS   OF  CONSOLIDATION  249 

At  one  time  it  was  generally  thought  that  education  was 
a  study  of  books.  To-day  we  know  that  the  child  is  edu- 
cated by  all  of  his  activities  and  his  environment.  So  we 
provide  for  the  best  play -and  social  Hfe,  we  provide  oppor- 
tunities for  such  expressions  as  will  educate,  and  we  give 
the  child  a  school  life  which  prepares  him  for  more  complete 
living.  The  successful  farmer  is  a  man  interested  in  his 
farm,  the  successful  business  man  is  one  interested  in  his 
business.  The  consolidated  school  in  every  way  is  suited 
to  make  children  interested  in  their  school  life. 

Play. — Our  consolidated  and  centralized  schools  are  pro- 
viding from  six  to  ten  acres  of  land  for  buildings,  play,  school 
gardens,  and  other  agricultural  experiment  work.  These 
schools  are  putting  out  playground  equipment,  such  as 
swings,  sHdes,  seesaws,  giant  stride,  and  horizontal  bars. 
Some  of  this  apparatus  is  made  by  the  manual-training  class. 
In  addition,  we  find  baseball  diamonds,  basket-ball,  lawn- 
tennis,  and  volley-ball.  Teachers  are  more  interested  and 
learn  new  games  to  teach  the  children.  In  many  of  the  one- 
room  schools  not  enough  boys  are  found  for  a  good  baseball 
game.  In  fact,  there  is  little  organized  play,  because  there 
are  not  enough  children  of  the  same  age  to  have  a  good 
game.  They  stand  around  in  small  groups  and  plan  some 
mischief.  Organized  play  is  a  great  help  in  saving  our  boys 
and  girls.  On  stormy  days  the  children  play  in  the  gym- 
nasium or  in  play- rooms. 

High  Schools  Made  Available. — Clearly  it  is  our  duty 
in  this  twentieth  century  to  provide  a  good  high  school 
within  easy  reach  of  every  boy  and  girl.  One  of  the  big  ad- 
vantages of  the  consolidated  system  is  the  provision  for  a 
rural  high  school.  In  19 14  the  high-school  enrolment  in 
the  Preble  County  school  district  was  523,  and  last  year  the 
enrolment  was  698,  an  increase  of  175,  or  33  per  cent.  This 
increase  is  remarkable  when  it  is  remembered  that  the 
enumeration  of  school  youth  has  decreased  by  59  in  that 
time.  The  great  increase  is  due  mostly  to  consolidation  of 
schools.     Two  years  ago,  before  Lanier  township  central- 


250  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

ized,  she  was  sending  22  pupils  to  neighboring  high  schools, 
and  now  her  enrolment  is  44,  which  is  just  double.  Previous 
to  consolidating  her  schools,  Jackson  township  had  32  pupils 
in  high  school,  and  now  under  the  consolidated  system  she 
has  65  pupils  in  high  school.  Two  years  ago  the  Monroe 
township  school  district  had  27  pupils  in  high  school,  while 
now  71  of  the  94  pupils  enrolled  in  the  consolidated  high 
school  come  from  the  township  district.  This  is  an  increase 
of  163  per  cent.  In  the  light  of  the  times  in  which  we  live 
these  facts  are  startling.  Our  progressive  farmers  are  re- 
solved that  a  high  school  shall  be  accessible  to  all. 

Probably  90  per  cent  of  the  boys  and  girls  in  the  country 
will  remain  on  the  farm,  so  the  rural  high  school  should  em- 
phasize the  life  of  the  farm  in  its  curriculum  and  in  its  teach- 
ing. To  a  large  degree  the  rural  high  school  should  be  a 
vocational  school,  preparing  for  the  occupation  of  the  farm 
and  the  farm  home.  In  our  cities,  schools  are  preparing 
boys  and  girls  for  the  great  occupations  of  the  city.  They 
are  endeavoring  to  give  them  the  education  that  prepares 
them  best  for  the  life  a  majority  of  them  will  lead.  A  very 
large  per  cent  of  their  pupils  will  engage  in  the  industries  of 
the  city.  Should  not  the  rural  high  school  prepare  for  the 
farm  life  in  place  of  preparing  for  college  and  the  profes- 
sional life?  The  emphasis  of  the  curriculum  of  the  rural 
high  school  should  be  placed  on  the  scientific  and  industrial 
side  and  not  on  the  Hnguistic  and  mathematical.  One  of  the 
great  advantages  of  the  centralized  township  over  those  not 
centralized  is  the  fact  that  it  gives  practically  all  of  their 
boys  and  girls  a  high-school  education. 

Let  us  compare  Jackson,  a  township  centralized  for  four 
years,  with  Washington,  a  township  not  centraHzed.  Jack- 
son township  maintains  a  first-grade  high  school.  Wash- 
ington township  does  not  maintain  a  high  school,  but  within 
the  township  district  is  the  county  seat,  Eaton,  which  has  a 
first-grade  high  school.  In  the  past  four  years  there  have 
been  graduated  from  the  eighth  grade  of  the  Jackson  town- 


METHODS  AND  FACTS  OF  CONSOLIDATION  25 1 

ship  school  60  pupils  and  from  the  Washington  township 
schools  80  pupils.  Jackson  township  has  55  of  the  60  eighth- 
grade  graduates  in  high  school,  while  Washington  township 
has  33  of  her  80  graduates  in  high  school.  In  these  four 
years  91  per  cent  of  the  Jackson  township  eighth-grade 
graduates  have  entered  high  school,  while  only  41  per  cent 
of  the  Washington  township  pupils  have  gone  to  high  school. 
What  is  the  result?  In  the  past  four  years  in  Washington 
township,  with  her  one-room  schools,  47  pupils  were  deprived 
of  a  high-school  education.  These  boys  and  girls  are  handi- 
capped for  life.  Careful  investigation  by  many  able  men 
proves  that  every  day  of  a  boy's  high-school  education  is 
worth  more  than  ten  dollars.  The  financial  loss  in  this 
township  every  year  is  astounding.  The  loss  in  happiness 
and  success  in  Hfe  is  a  tragedy.  Why  is  there  this  differ- 
ence? In  the  consolidated  township  the  children  are  accus- 
tomed to  going  to  the  central  school,  and  when  they  are 
ready  for  the  high  school  they  are  acquainted  and  do  not 
feel  timid  about  entering.  In  the  second  place,  they  are 
carried  free  to  the  high  school.  In  townships  not  consoli- 
dated they  must  provide  their  own  conveyance.  In  some 
cases  parents  cannot  afford  the  cost  of  keeping  an  extra 
horse  for  this  purpose,  and  in  some  cases  a  girl  cannot  be 
trusted  to  drive  alone  five  or  six  miles. 

In  the  larger  school  there  is  a  better  organization  and 
classification  of  the  work  which  also  is  being  modernized  to 
meet  the  intellectual,  industrial,  and  social  needs  of  rural 
community  life.  In  our  consolidated  schools  there  are 
courses  in  agriculture,  manual  arts,  domestic  science  and 
household  arts,  and  commercial  subjects.  In  1914,  before 
consolidation,  we  had  121  pupils  in  domestic-science  work 
and  61  in  the  manual-training  courses.  In  191 7,  after  con- 
solidation, there  were  392  pupils  taking  domestic- science 
work  and  155  taking  manual  training,  an  increase  of  224 
per  cent  in  domestic  science  and  154  per  cent  in  manual 
training. 


252  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

Costs  and  Returns. — Good  consolidated  schools  cost 
more  money  than  ©ne-room  schools.  The  houses  and  barns 
being  built  to-day  cost  more  than  they  did  forty  years  ago. 
The  farming  implements  now  used  cost  more  than  they  did 
in  the  days  of  the  scythe  and  the  cradle.  We  are  buying 
expensive  automobiles  instead  of  using  the  cheap  convey- 
ances of  many  years  ago.  Shall  we  not  have  a  modern 
school  even  though  it  costs  somewhat  more? 

Money  spent  for  education  is  an  investment  in  boys  and 
girls.  Men  are  investing  more  in  wheat- sowing  that  they 
may  reap  larger  harvests,  and  they  are  putting  more  money 
into  the  housing,  feeding,  and  breeding  of  stock  that  larger 
returns  may  be  attained.  Our  cities  and  more  progressive 
villages  are  making  very  large  investments  in  the  education 
of  their  boys  and  girls,  believing  that  no  money  spent  for 
the  public  brings  such  large  returns  as  that  invested  in  edu- 
cation. It  is  common  knowledge  that  the  farmers  of  our 
county  are  very  prosperous.  Is  there  any  good  cause  why 
they  should  not  have  the  best  modern  school  for  their 
children  ? 

In  comparing  the  cost  of  a  consolidated-school  system 
with  a  one- room  system,  there  are  several  facts  other  than 
the  total  cost  to  be  considered.  One  fact  is  the  per  capita 
basis  for  cost,  which  is  an  accurate  method  of  comparison. 
Let  us  compare  Monroe  township,  which  is  centralized, 
with  the  nearest  one-room  school,  sub.  district  No.  10,  in 
Washington  township.  In  Monroe  township  the  average 
annual  cost  for  both  tuition  and  transportation  for  each 
child  in  the  elementary  school  is  $37.62.  In  the  above-men- 
tioned one-room  school  in  Washington  township,  where  the 
enrolment  is  11,  the  average  annual  cost  for  tuition  is 
$50.90.  Another  fact  to  be  kept  in  mind  is  that  attendance 
of  children  in  consolidated  schools  is  much  better  and  more 
regular.  The  attendance  in  Somers  township  was  81  per 
cent  for  the  last  year  under  the  one-room  system;  the  next 
year  under  the  consohdated  system  the  attendance  was  92 


METHODS  AND  FACTS   OF  CONSOLIDATION  253 

per  cent.  With  several  hundred  pupils  enrolled  an  increase 
of  II  per  cent  in  attendance  means  that  the  total  amount 
of  schooling  was  increased  many  hundreds  of  days.  In  one 
month  one  rural  school  had  as  many  cases  of  tardiness  as 
the  whole  consolidated  school  had  in  the  whole  year.  Not 
only  is  there  the  loss  of  school  attendance  but  the  work  of 
the  school  is  greatly  crippled  by  the  irregular  attendance  of 
children.  Another  fact  to  be  considered  is  that  boys  and 
girls  remain  in  school  longer.  The  enrolment  of  both  upper 
grades  and  the  high  school  increases  when  schools  are  con- 
solidated. In  most  of  our  consolidated  schools  the  high- 
school  enrolment  has  more  than  doubled.  This  increased 
attendance  in  high  schools  has  a  money  value  of  almost 
unbelievable  size.  What  shall  we  say  of  the  value  to  the 
boys  and  girls  in  greater  usefulness  and  happiness?  Still 
another  fact  to  be  considered  in  comparing  costs  is  the  greater 
interest  in  school  work.  The  value  of  interest  in  one's  work 
cannot  be  estimated  in  dollars  and  cents,  and  yet  it  is  of 
the  highest  value.  Many  a  child  has  quit  school  because 
the  work  was  poor  and  uninteresting.  The  larger  teaching 
force,  better  building  and  equipment,  larger  number  of 
pupils,  and  more  work  with  things  of  vital  interest  as  found 
in  the  consolidated  school  are  surely  bringing  a  more  abun- 
dant Ufe  to  many  communities.  Then  transportation  saves 
for  parents  in  clothes  and  shoe-leather.  One  mother  in  a 
centralized  township  in  this  county  estimated  that  her 
family  was  saved  not  less  than  $25  a  year  in  this  way.  All 
of  the  above  facts  must  be  kept  distinctly  in  mind  when  we 
compare  costs  of  consolidated  and  one-room  school  systems. 
In  this  progressive  age  who  wants  cheap  rural  schools? 

In  this  chapter  there  is  no  space  for  a  discussion  of  such 
value  of  the  consolidated  school  as  building,  equipment, 
play,  auditorium,  socialization,  better  teachers,  better  class- 
work  through  division  of  labor,  modern  curriculum,  and 
closer  supervision.     They  are  treated  in  other  chapters. 

In  general,  it  can  be  asserted  truthfully  that  consolida- 


254  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

tion  improves  the  whole  community.  Land  values  increase 
because  of  better  school  advantages.  Such  a  school  draws 
the  people  of  the  whole  township  together  and  awakens  a 
deeper  interest  not  only  in  the  school  but  in  every  activity 
of  the  community.  It  helps  to  keep  people  in  the  country. 
It  brings  better  roads.  The  old-time  one-room  school  must 
give  way  to  something  better,  to  a  more  efficient  school  in 
keeping  with  the  progressive  age  in  which  we  live. 

Social. — The  consolidated  school  has  an  enrolment  large 
enough  to  give  the  social  and  cultural  contact  with  agree- 
able associates  necessary  for  the  best  development  of  every 
child. 

The  social  life  which  one  time  centred  around  the  coun- 
try school  in  spelling-bees,  debating,  singing-schools,  etc., 
has  passed.  The  drift  of  the  country  population  to  the 
city  is  partly  social.  To-day  the  social  life  of  the  rural 
community  must  be  reconstructed.  The  new  social  life 
will  find  its  best  centre  in  the  consolidated  school.  Here 
will  be  held  farmers'  institutes,  lectures,  concerts,  socials, 
and  entertainments  of  various  kinds.  The  schoolhouse  has 
been  a  monument  of  neglected  opportunity.  It  is  used  by 
about  one-fifth  of  the  people  about  six  hours  a  day  for  about 
half  the  days  of  the  year.  The  people  pay  taxes  for  the 
school  and  it  belongs  to  them;  they  should  use  it  more. 
It  is  too  valuable  to  stand  idle  so  much  of  the  time.  The 
large  auditorium  and  gymnasium  offer  facilities  for  gather- 
ings, both  social  and  recreational,  which  cannot  be  obtained 
in  the  small  school.  In  this  day  of  good  roads,  telephones, 
automobiles,  and  traction-cars,  a  township  is  a  social  group 
no  larger  in  area  than  was  the  subdistrict  fifty  years  ago. 
The  larger  social  group  has  many  advantages.  More  talent 
is  found  for  conducting  social  and  recreational  events,  and 
the  whole  township  is  united  as  never  before.  The  cen- 
tralized school  is  a  great  means  of  developing  a  spirit  of  co- 
operation among  the  people  of  the  township.  As  the  people 
of  the  various  communities  become  acquainted  at  the  school 


METHODS  AND  FACTS   OF  CONSOLIDATION  255 

meetings,  a  feeling  of  fellowship  and  common  interest  is 
developed  which  is  of  much  value  to  all.  A  township  li- 
brary may  be  maintained  at  the  school  building.  The  data 
given  below  should  be  noted  for  the  purpose  of  comparing 
the  community  work  of  the  consoHdated  school  and  the  one- 
room  school. 

Community  Meetings. — In  the  past  three  years  a  great 
many  community  meetings  have  been  held  by  the  schools. 
With  all  schools  under  supervision  and  nearly  all  consoli- 
dated, the  number  of  community  meetings  has  increased 
many  hundred  per  cent,  and  this  movement  will  increase 
in  extent  and  effectiveness.  The  resulting  advantages  to 
both  school  and  home  are  invaluable.  Some  results  are  en- 
tertainment and  recreation,  intellectual  improvement,  moral 
uplift,  social  intercourse,  encouragement  and  inspiration  in 
one's  daily  vocation.  A  comparison  between  townships 
with  one-room  schools  and  consoHdated  townships  is  very 
interesting  in  showing  the  value  of  the  consolidated  school 
in  sociaUzing  the  community.  In  a  period  of  five  months' 
time  last  winter  our  records  show  that  Twin  township  with 
one  two-room  and  eight  one-room  buildings  had  890  persons 
present  at  community  meetings,  while  Lanier  township, 
her  neighbor  on  the  south,  a  centraHzed  township,  had  2,625 
present.  Compare  the  amount  of  money  raised  to  help  the 
school.  The  uncentralized  township  received  $3.75  and 
the  centralized  school  received  $255.90.  The  two  townships 
have  about  the  same  school  population,  and  are  of  the  same 
area. 

Washington  and  Jackson  are  two  adjoining  townships. 
Washington  has  eight  one-room  schools,  while  Jackson  is 
centralized.  In  topography,  occupation,  and  wealth  they 
are  very  similar.  Washington's  school  population  is  just  a 
little  larger.  Jackson,  the  centralized  township,  held  20 
school  and  community  meetings,  with  an  attendance  of 
2,833,  ^^^  received  $183.20  to  improve  the  school;  Wash- 
ington, with  her  one-room  schools,  held  18  meetings,  with 


256 


THE   CONSOLmATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 


an  attendance  of  657,  and  received  $10.30  for  school  improve- 
ment. 

Every  school  should  have  a  permanent  organization  such 
as  community  club,  literary  society,  parent- teachers'  associa- 
tion, mothers'  club,  country  life  club,  singing  school,  read- 
ing club,  etc.  In  almost  every  community  there  is  much 
music  talent,  dramatic  talent,  and  speaking  talent  going  to 
waste.  And  how  important  it  is  to  give  the  opportunity  of 
expressing  this  talent,  especially  among  young  people. 

The  following  brief  summary  of  school  and  community 
meetings  held  in  the  schoolhouses  in  the  last  five  months  of 
the  school  year  from  January  i,  191 7,  to  June  i,  191 7,  is 
taken  from  reports  submitted  by  the  superintendents.  The 
character  of  these  meetings  was  quite  varied.  The  more 
important  meetings  were  entertainments  by  the  school, 
interschool  literary  contests,  illustrated  lectures  by  the 
school,  community  patriotic  sings,  class  plays,  commence- 
ment exercises,  interschool  athletic  contests,  lyceum  num- 
bers, socials,  spelling  schools,  class  parties,  teachers'  asso- 
ciations, junior  receptions,  parent- teachers'  meetings,  school 


School 

Superintendent 

Number  of 
Meetings 

Number 
Present 

Receipts 

College  Corner 

Dixon  township 

Gasper  township 

Gratis 

L.  D.  Brouse 

J.W.Smith 

E.  E.  McClellan. . . 
E.  E.  McClellan. . . 

Reuben  Koch 

E.E.  McClellan... 
C.  R.  Coblentz. . . . 
E.  E.  McClellan. . . 
H.  A.  Hoffman. . . . 

L.  F.  Schieser 

Reuben  Koch 

Reuben  Koch 

Reuben  Koch 

C.  A.  Matheny. . .  . 
E.  E.  McClellan. . . 
Reuben  Koch 

10 

6 
12 

5 
18 

5 
20 

15 
14 
22 
12 

7 
18 

17 
8 

I 

1,190 
960 
494 
950 

1,212 
762 

2,833 
2,625 

2,935 
2,600 

890 
1,025 

657 
6,505 
1,415 

250 

$245.50 

86.55 

34-65 

245.00 

6.20 

91   50 

183 . 20 

255  90 

270.50 

200.00 

3-75 

36.00 

10.30 

736.85 

200.00 

50.00 

Harrison  township 

Israel  township 

Jackson  township 

Lanier  township 

Lewisburg 

Monroe  township 

Twin  township 

Verona    ....       ... 

Washington  township.  . 

West  Alexandria 

West  Elkton 

West  Manchester 

METHODS  AND  FACTS   OF  CONSOLIDATION  257 

exhibits,  fanners'  improvement  associations,  mothers'  meet- 
ings, and  school  home-comings.  Many  Red  Cross  meetings 
and  farm  bureau  meetings  were  held  in  the  school  buildings. 
In  the  report  below,  lyceum  lectures  are  given  if  the  lyceum 
course  was  conducted  by  the  school.  Admission  was  charged 
for  some  of  the  meetings  and  the  receipts  are  for  such  meet- 
ings. Of  course,  many  of  the  meetings  were  free.  One 
school  used  800  slides  with  their  stereopticon  in  community 
work. 

Supervision. — The  consolidated  school  has  the  advantage 
of  more  and  closer  supervision.  In  such  a  school  the  super- 
intendent may  inspect  the  work  of  the  teacher  every  day. 
He  can  give  the  advice  and  help  to  the  teacher  just  when 
it  is  needed.  He  can  take  care  of  cases  of  discipline  at  once. 
The  superintendent  of  the  one-room  schools  necessarily 
must  lose  much  time  in  travelling  to  and  from  schools,  and 
he  cannot  be  in  as  close  touch  with  the  work  as  the  superin- 
tendent of  the  consolidated  school. 

The  above  facts  must  be  kept  distinctly  in  mind  when 
we  compare  costs  of  consolidated  and  one-room  school 
systems.  In  this  wealthy  country  and  in  this  progressive 
age,  who  wants  cheap  schools? 

Transportation. — When  consolidation  is  first  broached 
in  a  community,  it  is  found  that  conveyance  of  the  children 
is  responsible  for  much  of  the  opposition.  Many  fail  to 
see  the  numerous  advantages  of  the  larger  school  which 
can  be  secured  only  by  conveying  the  children.  As  shown 
in  the  preceding  chapter,  where  consolidation  has  been 
tried  for  a  few  years,  90  to  95  per  cent  of  the  patrons 
give  it  their  hearty  support.  This  system  has  been  thor- 
oughly tried  out  in  many  States  and  is  proving  a  great 
success. 

Some  children  live  two  miles  from  the  one-room  school. 
Who  has  not  seen  them  trudging  home  through  mud  and 
snow  as  the  shades  of  night  were  falling?  A  prominent 
farmer  in  Washington  township  near  the  Monroe  line  lives 


258  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

two  miles  from  the  nearest  subdistrict  school  in  his  town- 
ship and  four  and  one-half  miles  from  the  Monroe  town- 
ship centralized  school.  He  recently  said  that  his  boy 
started  for  school  in  the  morning  at  the  same  time  a  Mon- 
roe township  school  wagon  came  past  his  place.  The  boy 
arrived  at  school  about  the  same  time  the  wagon  reached  its 
destination.  In  the  evening  his  boy  arrived  home  about 
ten  minutes  before  the  wagon  arrived.  This  farmer  at  one 
time  opposed  centralization,  but  now  has  petitioned  to  be 
transferred  to  the  Monroe  consolidated  school  nearly  five 
miles  away. 

It  is  rather  strange  that  farmers  living  within  a  few 
miles  of  transportation  routes  of  consolidated  schools  will 
not  go  near  enough  to  investigate  rumors  about  unsatisfac- 
tory hauling  of  school  children,  but  will  beUeve  some  wild 
statement  of  some  irresponsible  person  about  transportation 
in  such  a  system.  No  sensible  person  expects  perfection 
in  a  system  that  involves  so  many  persons  and  conditions. 
On  the  other  hand,  let  us  not  forget  the  disadvantages  of 
walking  to  the  one- room  school. 

A  route  travelled  by  a  school  bus  drawn  by  a  team  should 
not  be  over  six  miles  long  from  the  place  where  the  first 
child  enters  the  wagon.  If  possible  it  should  be  less.  No 
child  should  enter  the  school  wagon  earher  than  seven 
o'clock,  standard  time.  On  shorter  routes  the  time  should 
be  later.  Wagons  should  not  vary  in  the  time  of  starting 
regardless  of  roads  and  weather.  It  is  better  that  the  open- 
ing of  school  be  delayed  a  few  minutes  than  for  wagons  to 
be  irregular  in  time  of  starting.  Every  parent  should  have 
a  time  schedule  at  home  showing  exactly  when  the  wagon 
is  due  to  arrive  at  his  home.  Many  wagons  in  our  county 
run  so  regularly  that  they  are  not  more  than  two  or  three 
minutes  off  schedule  for  many  weeks  at  a  time. 

It  is  likely  that  in  a  few  years  most  of  the  children  in 
this  county  will  be  carried  to  school  in  motor  school  cars. 
The  motor-car  has  many  advantages  over  the  wagon  drawn 


METHODS  AND  FACTS  OF  CONSOLIDATION  259 

by  horses.  Of  course,  the  chief  advantage  is  that  a  route 
can  be  travelled  by  the  motor-car  in  less  than  half  the  time 
it  takes  a  team.  Such  cars  are  being  used  successfully  in 
several  States  where  roads  are  not  as  good  as  they  are  in 
Preble  County. 

In  our  centralized  townships  more  than  60  per  cent  of  the 
children  ride  but  three  miles  or  less.  The  children  like  to 
ride.  The  wagons  are  enclosed  with  glass  sides,  have 
cushioned  seats,  and  are  heated  and  ventilated.  The  chil- 
dren are  protected  from  cold,  rain,  snow,  and  mud. 

Drivers  of  wagons  sit  inside  and  have  the  same  control 
over  pupils  as  the  teacher  and  are  under  bond  to  give  ser- 
vice according  to  contract.  The  drivers  should  be  men 
carefully  selected. 

Transportation  of  children  does  away  with  fighting,  bad 
language,  and  other  misconduct  on  the  way  to  and  from 
school. 

There  is  a  saving  to  parents  in  clothes  and  shoe-leather. 
One  mother  in  a  centralized  township  in  this  county  esti- 
mated that  their  family  was  saved  not  less  than  twenty-five 
dollars  a  year  in  this  way. 

To  convey  children  to  school  makes  the  attendance  far 
better.  Hear  what  one  farmer  says:  "Think  of  the  little 
children  plodding  schoolward  in  cold  and  wet  and  mire — 
when  they  go  at  all!  Then  count  up  the  number  of  days 
they  are  kept  home  altogether  because  of  bad  roads  and 
severe  weather ! "  Read  what  the  records  show  in  one  town- 
ship of  this  county  the  next  year  after  the  schools  were 
consolidated:  "The  consolidated  system  of  managing  the 
schools  showed  many  improvements  over  the  old  way.  One 
of  these  was  in  attendance.  The  attendance  the  last  year 
of  the  rural  schools  was  81  per  cent,  while  this  year  it  was 
92  per  cent — an  increase  of  11  per  cent.  Another  was  in 
regard  to  tardiness.  During  the  last  year  of  the  rural  schools 
in  one  month  in  one  of  the  schools  there  were  thirty-three 
cases  of  tardiness.     This  year,  under  the  consolidated  sys- 


26o  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

tern,  we  had  scarcely  that  many  for  the  entire  year."  Who 
can  figure  the  value  of  such  an  increase  in  attendance  and 
punctuality  ? 

In  general,  it  can  truthfully  be  asserted  that  consolida- 
tion improves  the  entire  township  or  consolidation  area. 
Land  values  increase  because  of  better  school  advantages. 
Such  a  school  draws  the  people  of  the  whole  township  to- 
gether and  awakens  a  deeper  interest  not  only  in  the  school 
but  in  every  activity  of  the  community.  It  helps  to  keep 
people  in  the  country.     It  brings  better  roads. 

The  old-time  one-room  school  must  give  way  to  some- 
thing better,  to  a  more  efficient  school  in  keeping  with  the 
progressive  age  in  which  we  live.  The  answer  is  consoli- 
dation. 


III.    In  Randolph  County,  Indiana 

Randolph  County  is  situated  in  the  east-central  part 
of  Indiana.  Its  surface  is  somewhat  level,  being,  however, 
easily  drained,  making  good  roads  easy  to  secure. 

Consolidation  first  began  in  this  county  at  Losantville, 
Nettle  Creek  township.  The  school  authorities  thought  it 
wise  to  transport  two  small  district  schools  to  this  place. 
Although  this  brought  about  a  storm  of  opposition,  the  ex- 
periment was  tried  and  has  proved  a  great  success.  The 
building  was  erected  in  1905,  and  is  of  concrete,  costing 
$14,000.  It  has  since  been  equipped  at  a  cost  of  about 
$1,000,  including  desks,  globes,  maps,  library,  laboratories 
for  manual  training,  cooking,  sewing,  and  agriculture.  For 
the  first  time  in  the  history  of  the  county  schools  the  flush 
system  of  toilets  was  installed  in  a  township  building.  A 
high  school  was  established  with  a  three  years'  course  of 
six  months  each.  This  has  been  increased  to  a  four  years' 
course  of  eight  months,  and  is  now  a  commissioned  school, 
meeting  state  requirements.  From  the  very  first  this  school 
has  been  a  success,  which  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  94  per 


METHODS  AND   FACTS   OF   CONSOLIDATION  261 

cent  of  the  eighth-year  graduates  have  entered  high  schools. 

The  school  corporation  of  Lynn  was  laid  down,  and  the 
township  took  charge  of  its  school  and  built  a  six-room 
building  at  a  cost  of  about  $24,000.  At  the  dedication  of 
this  building  Doctor  Hurty,  of  the  State  Board  of  Health,  in 
making  an  address,  spoke  of  the  "large  and  commodious 
building,  sanitary  in  every  part,  large  enough  to  meet  the 
needs  of  the  community  for  years."  The  people  of  the  com- 
munity, realizing  the  advantages  of  such  a  school,  abandoned 
two  of  the  district  schools,  and  it  became  the  duty  of  the 
same  Doctor  Hurty  to  condemn  the  building  because  of  its 
lack  of  room  in  1909.  A  six-room  addition  was  built  to 
meet  the  growing  needs  of  this  school,  but  again  we  find 
an  insufficiency  of  room,  as  the  building  is  now  crowded  in 
every  part.  This  shows  the  importance  of  planning  for 
all  extensions  at  the  start,  an  object  attained  readily  by 
means  of  the  one-story  school  as  shown  in  Chapter  IX. 
Laboratories  for  physics,  botany,  agriculture,  manual  train- 
ing, sewing,  and  cooking  are  installed.  From  a  school  re- 
quiring but  six  teachers  and  having  a  high-school  course 
of  three  years  this  one  has  quickly  grown  to  a  school  requir- 
ing thirteen  teachers,  and  is  commissioned.  The  enrol- 
ment of  eighth-year  graduates  has  increased  from  80  per 
cent  to  97  per  cent. 

In  191 2  five  districts  in  the  north  part  of  this  same  town- 
ship petitioned  the  trustee  to  abandon  the  district  schools 
and  consolidate  them.  To  this  end  the  Beech  Grove,  a 
$15,000  five-room  building,  was  erected  in  191 2. 

In  1908  a  four-room  dilapidated,  insanitary  fire- trap  of 
a  schoolhouse  in  Greensfork  township  gave  way  to  a  mod- 
ern ten-room  building.  This  building  is  not  only  sanitary 
and  modern  in  every  particular,  but  is  an  architectural 
beauty.  It  is  situated  in  a  maple-grove  near  the  centre  of 
the  township,  and  accommodates  the  pupils  from  six  dis- 
tricts. 

The  high  school  maintained  here  has  grown  from  a  three 


262  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

years'  course  of  six  months  to  a  four  years'  course  of  eight 
months,  and  was  commissioned  in  191 1.  The  per  cent  of 
attendance  of  the  eighth-year  graduates  has  increased  from 
60  per  cent  to  97  per  cent  since  the  erection  of  this  build- 
ing. 

In  1908  the  trustee  of  White  River  township  found  him- 
self facing  the  problem  of  several  small  schools  and  poor 
buildings  in  the  western  part  of  his  township.  It  was 
deemed  advisable  to  build  a  consolidated  school.  To  this 
end  a  four- room  building  was  erected  at  a  cost  of  $14,000. 
Many  people  looked  upon  it  as  a  foolish  undertaking,  as  it 
is  situated  entirely  remote  from  any  town  or  village.  In 
fact,  at  the  dedication  of  this  building,  known  as  the  "Lin- 
coln," prophets  were  heard  to  say  that  the  time  would  never 
come  when  the  building  would  be  half  filled.  This  school 
began  with  an  enrolment  of  43.  Its  advantages  were  soon 
seen  by  the  people  of  the  surrounding  districts,  and  the  fol- 
lowing year  three  heavily  populated  districts  petitioned  to 
be  abandoned  and  transported  to  this  school.  Many  others 
from  surrounding  districts,  also,  seeing  its  advantages,  trans- 
ported their  children  at  their  own  expense.  This  reduced 
the  attendance  in  the  other  schools  until  three  went  down 
for  lack  of  attendance.  The  high  school  was  established  in 
1 9 10,  and  is  now  commissioned. 

The  experiment  was  so  successful  and  the  attendance 
so  large  that  the  building  soon  became  inadequate.  As 
some  of  the  high-school  children  were  transported  from  the 
east  end  of  the  township,  it  was  thought  that  the  situation 
might  be  relieved  by  erecting  another  large  building  in  the 
eastern  part  of  the  township.  This  was  done  in  191 1,  but 
so  great  was  the  demand  and  need  of  more  room  in  the 
"Lincoln,"  that  97  patrons  out  of  loi  petitioned  the  trus- 
tees and  advisory  board  to  double  the  capacity  of  the  school 
building.  This  was  done  in  the  summer  of  191 2,  and  in- 
stead of  a  failure,  as  was  predicted  by  some,  we  find  it  a 
ten-room  building  equipped  for  botany,  agriculture,  manual 


I  WASHINGTON 

3  NEWVORK 

4  CALIfORNtA 

5  CONNECTICVn 
b  OHIO 

7  N£W  JERSEY 

8  ILLIN015 

9  colorado 

10  Indiana 

1 1  RHODE.  I5LAWD 

12  VEPMONT 


»3  NEW  HAMPSHIRE    I 


14  UTAH 
J5  OREQDN 

16  MONTANA 

17  MICHIGAN 

15  N  &AKDTA 
19  IDAHO 

»  MINNESOTA 

21  IOWA 

2^  MAINE. 

a  PENN5YLVAWIA 

14  KAN5A5 


W/////Ay/////A  ^'/m.v''/v^vy^^M 
\w//XA\v/?///Ay///jm        I 

v//y///A/     \y/////AV//////A\ 


f^'^^fWIW^\'m<mA-y//////A 


is  NEBRASKA 
Zb  5  DAKOTA 
^T  NLVADA 
2fi  WkiCONSlKI 
10  WYOMING 

30  ARIZONA 

31  OKLAHOMA 

32  MCSSOU^I 
35  W  VIRGINVA 

34  FLORIDA 

35  DELAWAPE 

36  MARYLAND 

37  TtNNE5St£ 

38  TEXAS 

39  IO0I3IANA 

40  NEW  MEXICO 

41  VIRGINIA 

42  KLNTOCKY 
4i  ARKANSAS 

44  GEORGIA 

45  M»^*^^PP» 
^  N  CAROLINA 

47  C).  CARDL»NA 

48  ALABAMA 

Rank  of  States  in  Each  of  Ten  Educational  Features,  igio. 
White  indicates  that  the  State  ranks  in  the  highest  12  of  the  48 — Black  ranks 
in  the  lowest  12. 


263 


264  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

training,  sewing,  cooking,  and  attended  by  257  pupils. 
There  are  five  acres  in  the  school  lot.  This  does  not  in- 
clude a  one-acre  lot  upon  which  the  school  residence  is 
located. 

The  other  building  referred  to  in  the  above  paragraph  is 
known  as  the  ''McKinley,"  and  is  situated  on  a  six-acre 
lot  one  mile  east  of  Winchester.  It  is  an  eight-room  build- 
ing, costing  $28,000,  modern  in  every  particular,  and  fully 
equipped  for  all  the  needs  of  a  modern  school.  Pupils  of 
seven  abandoned  schools  are  being  transported  to  this 
building.  The  enrolment  for  the  current  year  is  215. 
The  high  school  maintained  here  is  also  commissioned. 

For  five  years  previous  to  the  establishment  of  the  town- 
ship high  schools  in  this  township  the  enrolment  of  eighth- 
year  graduates  was  53  per  cent.  Since  these  high  schools 
have  been  started,  93  per  cent  of  the  eighth-year  graduates 
have  been  enrolled  in  the  high  school. 

In  1909  Parker  abandoned  its  school  corporation,  and  its 
management  was  assumed  by  Monroe  township.  A  new 
building  was  necessary.  Four  acres  of  ground  near  town 
were  purchased  by  the  trustee,  and  a  building  costing  $34,500 
was  erected.  This  is  also  well  equipped,  maintains  a  com- 
missioned school,  and  has  twelve  teachers.  The  children  in 
the  western  half  of  the  township  are  transported  by  wagons 
and  interurban  trolley-car  to  this  school.  This  building  is 
equipped  for  manual  training,  sewing,  cooking,  botany, 
agriculture,  and  physics.  The  per  cent  of  attendance  of 
eighth-year  graduates  has  increased  from  67  per  cent  to  90. 
The  children  in  the  eastern  half  of  the  township  are  trans- 
ported to  Farmland  joint  consolidated  school.  This  build- 
ing was  erected  in  1908  at  a  cost  of  $45,000.  It  is  equipped 
similarly  to  the  one  just  described. 

The  banner  year  for  schoolhouse  construction  was  19 10, 
when  three  townships  erected  consolidated  buildings. 

Green  township  erected  a  six-room  $19,000  building  upon 
a   three-acre   school   lot   in    the   centre   of    the   township. 


METHODS  AND  FACTS  OF  CONSOLIDATION  265 

This  was  the  first  township  in  the  county  to  have  complete 
consolidation.  All  of  the  eight  schools  were  abandoned  and 
transported  to  the  central  school.  For  five  years  previous 
to  the  establishment  of  this  school  but  21  per  cent  of  its 
eighth-year  graduates  enrolled  in  high  school.  This  low 
per  cent  is  perhaps  due  to  the  fact  that  no  high  schools  were 
near  this  township.  The  growth  of  this  school  has  been 
remarkable,  and  a  four  years'  commissioned  high  school  is 
maintained.  The  per  cent  of  attendance  of  the  eighth- 
year  graduates  has  increased  from  21  to  92  per  cent. 

Jackson  township  is  another  that  built  in  the  year  19 10. 
Its  building  was  erected  in  the  centre  of  the  township,  and, 
like  the  others,  is  modern  in  every  particular.  It  had  six 
rooms  and  was  built  at  a  cost  of  $18,000.  Two  rooms  were 
occupied  the  first  year,  but  in  191 2,  every  nook  and  corner 
being  filled,  a  three-room  addition  was  built.  This  build- 
ing, like  the  others  in  the  county,  is  complete  in  every 
respect.  Consolidation  of  the  township  is  complete.  The 
high  school  is  commissioned  and  has  an  attendance  of  63 
pupils. 

Ward  township  had  a  high  school  at  Saratoga  previous 
to  the  year  19 10,  but  Saratoga  is  in  the  extreme  corner  of 
the  township,  which  made  the  high  school  inaccessible  to 
most  of  the  children  of  the  township.  Two  schools  aban- 
doned for  lack  of  attendance,  together  with  three  abandoned 
by  petition,  were  centraUzed  in  the  "Jefferson,"  near  Deer- 
field,  in  the  western  part  of  the  township.  This  building 
has  six  classrooms  and  two  recitation  rooms,  and  was 
built  at  a  cost  of  $17,000.  The  high  school  is  now  commis- 
sioned and  is  growing  very  rapidly.  The  attendance  of 
eighth-year  graduates  in  the  territory  covered  by  this  school 
has  increased  from  31  per  cent  to  92  per  cent.  An  addition 
is  now  being  built. 

In  the  spring  of  191 1  the  State  Board  of  Health  con- 
demned the  joint  school  building  between  Nettle  Creek  and 
West  River  townships  at  Modoc,  and  the  trustees  of  these 


266  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

townships  built  a  seven-room  building  at  a  cost  of  $18,000. 
During  the  summer  three  district  schools  petitioned  to  be 
abandoned  and  consolidated  with  the  school  at  Modoc. 
The  high  school,  which  had  been  a  two  years'  course  of  seven 
months,  was  put  upon  a  commissioned  basis  immediately, 
and  has  grown  from  an  attendance  of  1 5  to  40.  The  sqhool 
is  now  commissioned,  and  the  per  cent  of  enrolment  of 
eighth-grade  graduates  in  the  territory  covered  by  this 
school  has  increased  from  68  per  cent  to  96. 

At  the  same  time  in  which  the  Modoc  school  building 
was  condemned  another  structure  in  West  River  township 
at  Huntsville  was  also  condemned,  but  the  Board  of  Health, 
realizing  that  a  township  would  be  burdened  by  erecting 
two  buildings  during  the  same  year,  extended  the  time  of 
condemnation  to  191 2.  In  the  summer  of  191 2  a  four- room 
building  was  erected  at  Huntsville  at  a  cost  of  $15,000. 
This  school,  like  the  one  at  Modoc,  has  been  increased  from 
a  two  years'  course  of  seven  months  and  placed  upon  a 
commissioned  basis.  Pupils  of  four  abandoned  schools  are 
being  transported  to  this  school,  leaving  but  two  district 
schools  in  the  township.  The  eighth-year  enrolment  has 
increased  from  68  per  cent  to  92  per  cent. 

In  the  spring  of  191 2  four  districts  in  the  central  part  of 
Wayne  township  petitioned  to  be  abandoned  and  consoli- 
dated in  a  central  school.  To  this  end  five  acres  of  ground 
were  purchased  and  a  contract  let  for  a  seven-room  build- 
ing at  a  cost  of  $23,000.  The  old  school  building  is  converted 
into  a  teacherage  and  is  occupied  by  the  principal  of  the 
school.  The  school  has  an  attendance  of  225.  The  high 
school  is  commissioned,  with  an  attendance  of  40.  The  per 
cent  of  enrolment  in  the  high  school  has  increased  from 
44  per  cent  to  95.  A  seven- room  building  is  now  being 
built  in  the  northern  part  of  this  same  township.  All  of 
the  district  schools  have  been  abandoned. 

The  last  building  to  be  constructed  is  in  Stony  Creek 
township.     This  is  an  eight-room  building,  like  the  other 


METHODS   AND   FACTS   OF   CONSOLIDATION  267 

schools,  equipped  in  every  particular  for  complete  com- 
munity service. 

Construction. — In  mentioning  the  number  of  rooms  in 
each  of  the  buildings  named  above  we  have  made  no  at- 
tempt to  enumerate  such  rooms  as  might  be  termed  recita- 
tion, library,  laboratory,  rest,  or  play  rooms.  Each  build- 
ing has  from  two  to  six  such  rooms,  which  are  as  valuable 
in  their  place  as  the  rooms  mentioned  in  the  description. 
During  the  war  building  ceased,  of  course. 

These  buildings  have  been  built  according  to  the  rules 
and  regulations  of  the  State  Board  of  Health,  as  to  lighting, 
heating,  and  ventilating.  The  heating  is  by  furnace  and 
steam,  the  ventilation  being  by  fans.  Automatic  regulation 
is  installed  in  most  of  these  buildings,  thus  insuring  a  con- 
stant temperature.  The  flush  system  of  toilets  is  made 
possible  by  cesspools,  which  are  easily  drained,  and  which 
have  proved  very  satisfactory. 

The  cost  given  is  in  most  cases  the  contract  price,  and 
does  not  include  any  improvements  or  equipment. 

In  some  cases  the  old  school  buildings  are  used  for  barns 
and  in  others  new  barns  have  been  built.  These  are  used 
for  the  horses  of  the  hack  drivers  and  of  children  who  fur- 
nish their  own  transportation. 

These  barns  are  constructed  so  that  by  removing  a 
temporary  stall  the  school  hacks  may  be  stored  during  the 
summer. 

Transportation. — The  greatest  problem  in  consolidated 
schools  is  the  transportation  of  the  children.  The  testi- 
mony in  preceding  chapters  is  convincing  and  sufficient. 
Emphasis  has  been  laid  on  securing  the  best  men  as  drivers 
with  the  best  teams  to  be  had,  and  these  attached  to  the 
best  hacks  possible.  Too  great  care  cannot  be  taken  to 
insure  the  best  service  in  this  line.  The  hack  routes  must 
be  as  short  as  possible,  so  that  children  may  be  in  the 
wagons  for  a  minimum  period  only.  The  hacks  should  be 
commodious,  warm,  and  well  ventilated.     To  this  end  the 


268  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

trustees  of  this  county  are  purchasing  only  hacks  that  have 
glass  sides  and  ventilators.  They  should  be  heated  by 
coal-stoves  and  thus  eliminate  any  fumes. 

The  glass  sides  give  good  opportunity  for  ventilation  and 
insure  plenty  of  Hght,  both  of  which  are  not  only  essential 
to  good  health  but  are  conducive  to  good  deportment. 
Hack  drivers  who  formerly  drove  the  hacks  with  curtained 
sides  report  that  the  discipline  in  the  modern  hacks  is 
much  better.  This  is  due  largely  to  the  fact  that  the  hacks 
have  plenty  of  light,  and  that  the  children  can  see  over  the 
country  as  they  pass  along.  This  is  also  an  insurance 
against  accidents  while  crossing  railroads. 

The  hacks  used  here  have  double  floors,  which  also  adds 
much  to  the  comfort  of  the  children. 

To  reiterate,  good  roads  are  a  necessity  to  successful 
transportation.  Since  these  hacks  have  to  go  over  the  roads 
at  all  times  of  the  winter,  they  are  equipped  with  wheels 
having  two-and-one-fourth-inch  tires,  to  prevent  any  un- 
necessary wear  upon  the  road.  Hack  routes,  like  mail 
routes,  bring  about  good  roads,  since  the  best  service  is 
only  possible  under  the  most  favorable  conditions. 

Only  men  of  the  highest  moral  worth  should  be  employed 
as  drivers.  As  much  care  should  be  exercised  in  the  selec- 
tion of  a  hack  driver  who  has  charge  of  the  children  to  and 
from  school  as  in  the  teacher  who  has  charge  of  them  while 
in  school.  The  best  of  men  can  qnly  be  secured  when  the 
position  pays  the  price  demanded  by  a  first-class  man. 
Bids  for  driving  a  hack  should  never  be  taken  by  a  trustee, 
as  this  brings  about  unsatisfactory  complications. 

The  rules  and  regulations  of  the  hack  service  should  be 
a  part  of  the  contract  into  which  the  hack  driver  enters 
and  in  which  he  gives  bond  for  the  successful  performance 
of  the  work.  The  contract  here  shown  is  the  one  used  in 
this  county,  and  attempts  to  reach  and  overcome  some  of 
the  difficulties  encountered  in  the  past. 

Each  hack  driver  is  required  to  make  a  daily  report  to 


METHODS  AND  FACTS  OF  CONSOLIDATION  269 

the  principal  of  the  school.  This  not  only  secures  his  co- 
operation but  the  children  in  this  way  learn  of  their  re- 
sponsibility to  the  driver.  A  report  is  also  required  of  each 
driver  to  the  county  superintendent  in  order  that  he  may  be 
made  acquainted  with  prevailing  conditions. 

Community  Centres. — These  buildings  are  constructed 
for  a  broader  purpose  than  mere  school  buildings.  They 
have  become  the  centres  of  community  interests  because  of 
their  facihties  for  the  accommodation  of  public  gatherings. 
Many  of  the  townships  have  no  other  public  buildings  of 
sufficient  size  to  accommodate  general  meetings  of  the  com- 
munity. Without  exception  these  buildings  have  audi- 
toriums which  are  made  by  combining  two  to  four  rooms, 
and  sometimes  the  corridor.  Folding-doors  of  unusual  height 
are  used  for  this  purpose.  These  auditoriums  vary  in  size, 
depending  on  the  size  of  the  building,  but  in  most  instances 
will  seat  300  to  600  people.  These  facihties  have  brought 
about  many  entertainments  such  as  are  given  in  lecture 
courses  of  high  quaUty.  Commencements,  township  insti- 
tutes, both  teachers'  and  farmers'  poUtical  meetings,  Sunday- 
school  conventions,  farmers'  organizations,  parents'  and 
teachers'  meetings — in  fact,  all  meetings  found  in  any  high- 
grade  community  are  being  held  in  these  buildings.  This 
has  brought  about  a  closer  relation  between  patrons,  chil- 
dren, and  the  schools,  and  this  alone  is  well  worth  the  extra 
cost  of  any  auditorium. 

These  schools  have  also  brought  about  a  higher  appre- 
ciation of  school  work  beyond  the  eighth  grade.  Families 
are  now  represented  in  the  high  schools  of  the  townships 
which  were  never  represented  before.  Children  no  longer 
discuss  the  question  of  stopping  at  the  eighth  grade,  be- 
cause they  have  in  their  own  midst  an  institution  of  higher 
learning.  We  know  of  no  more  convincing  proof  of  the 
above-mentioned  influences  than  a  reference  to  the  statistical 
report  of  this  county.  In  1908-9,  the  year  before  these 
schools  were  started  outside  the  towns,  this  county  had  371 


270  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

eighth-grade  pupils  enrolled,  61  high-school  pupils,  in  com- 
missioned high  schools.  In  191 5-1 6,  by  a  strange  coinci- 
dence, the  report  shows  the  same  number  of  eighth-grade 
pupils,  but  the  enrolment  in  the  high  school  has  in- 
creased from  61  to  657.  Eighty-seven  per  cent  of  the 
pupils  of  the  townships  of  the  county  are  in  consolidated 
schools. 

This  influence  not  only  reaches  to  those  of  the  eighth 
year,  but  extends  entirely  throughout  the  grades,  and  the 
general  attitude  of  these  lower  grades  toward  the,  schools 
and  school  problems  is  perceptibly  better.  As  one  reflects 
upon  the  schools  of  the  past  and  compares  them  with  those 
of  the  present  with  all  their  advantages,  the  question  arises : 
"What  great  things  are  in  store  for  the  children  of  the  next 
generation?" 


IV.    Jordan  Consolidated  Rural  High  School 

The  Jordan  school  district  is  situated  in  the  southern 
part  of  the  fertile  Salt  Lake  Valley,  nine  miles  south  of 
Salt  Lake  City,  Utah,  and  embraces  within  its  boundaries 
2,800  square  miles  of  territory,  which  includes  the  follow- 
ing communities:  Bingham,  Riverton,  Sandy,  South  Jordan, 
Union,  West  Jordan,  Bluffdale,  Butler,  Crescent,  Draper, 
Granite,  Herriman,  Lark,  and  Midvale;  it  is  traversed  by 
the  Oregon  Short  Line,  Denver  and  Rio  Grande,  Bingham 
and  Garfield,  San  Pedro,  Los  Angeles,  and  Salt  Lake  Rail- 
roads, and  the  Orem  Electric  Interurban  Line. 

The  district  is  reached  and  traversed  for  a  short  distance 
by  the  Utah  Light  and  Power  Railway  Company,  which  is 
the  street  railroad  operating  in  and  around  Salt  Lake  City. 
There  are  100  miles  of  railroad  in  the  district.  The  as- 
sessed valuation  of  the  district  in  19 18  was  $49,000,000; 
population  estimated,  20,000;    the  school  population  was 

5.307- 


METHODS  AND   FACTS  OF  CONSOLIDATION  271 

The  school  district  maintains  two  high  schools,  the  Jor- 
dan high  school  at  Sandy  and  the  Jordan  high  school  at 
Bingham.  The  latter  accommodates  the  students  of  the 
two  mining  towns  of  Bingham,  population  5,000,  and 
Lark,  population  500;  the  remaining  part  of  the  district 
being  largely  agricultural,  supports  the  Jordan  high  school 
at  Sandy. 

The  building  shown  elsewhere  is  the  home  of  the  Jordan 
high  school  at  Sandy.  It  stands  near  the  geographical 
centre  of  the  Jordan  district,  the  southern  part  of  Salt  Lake 
County.  It  is  235  feet  long  by  166  wide  and  45  feet  high. 
It  contains  40  large,  well-lighted  rooms,  adapted  to  various 
high-school  acti\dties.  The  auditorium  is  60  feet  by  90 
feet,  has  a  large  stage,  a  commodious  balcony,  and  is 
equipped  with  900  opera-chairs  of  the  best  design.  It  is 
well  adapted  for  assemblies  and  dramatic  activities.  The 
gymnasium  is  60  by  90  feet,  the  standard  size,  and  has  a 
balcony  for  spectators,  a  balcony  music-stand,  and  com- 
modious dressing-rooms  and  showers  adjoining,  for  both 
boys  and  girls.  The  building  is  well  adapted  to  social 
and  physical  activities.  The  study  hall  is  a  well-lighted 
room  containing  100  seats  of  the  best  modern  type;  ad- 
joining the  study  hall  is  a  small  but  very  choice  library. 
Besides  the  rooms  described,  there  are  35  rooms  adapted  to 
recitation  and  laboratory  work.  These  have  been  especially 
designed  for  domestic  science,  domestic  art,  mechanic  arts, 
agriculture,  physics,  chemistry,  biology,  and  other  class- 
room activities.  The  building  is  thus  well  adapted  for 
modern  high-school  activities. 

The  heating  and  the  ventilating  plants  are  likewise  well 
equipped.  The  former  has  two  80  horse-power  boilers  that 
are  fed  by  electric  stokers.  The  latter  has  a  large  electric 
fan  connected  by  air-ducts  with  all  the  rooms.  The  boilers 
heat  the  rooms  by  means  of  steam  radiators,  while  the  fan 
draws  in  pure  air  from  a  height  of  25  feet  on  the  outside,  and 
sends  it  wanned  to  all  parts  of  the  building.     The  tempera- 


272  THE   CONSOLroATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

ture  is  regulated  automatically,  so  that  it  ranges  constantly 
between  65  and  68  degrees  Fahrenheit. 

The  campus  has  twenty- three  acres  of  ground.  This  is 
devoted  to  agriculture  and  to  athletics.  A  small  model 
dairy  farm  is  maintained  in  connection  with  the  courses 
in  agriculture.  Football-courts,  tennis-courts,  baseball  dia- 
mond, and  running  courses  are  laid  off  for  use  in  athletics 
and  sports.  Around  the  building  the  ground  is  devoted 
to  appropriate  landscape-gardens.  On  one  corner  of  the 
campus  is  a  new  brick  cottage  for  the  principal  and  another 
for  the  superintendent  of  schools;  another  corner  is  occu- 
pied by  the  custodian,  who  is  engaged  the  year  round  and 
supervises  the  building  and  grounds. 

This  plant  is  that  of  a  consolidated  rural  high  school. 
Located  in  the  open  country  as  it  is,  it  is  not  in  any  sense 
local.  The  nearest  community,  Sandy,  is  one  mile  away. 
Other  communities  that  patronize  the  school  range  from 
one  up  to  twelve  miles  distant.  These  communities  sepa- 
rately are  too  small  to  maintain  a  first-class  modern  high 
school;  conjointly  in  consolidation  they  have  estabhshed 
one  of  the  largest  and  best  high-school  plants  in  the 
State. 

The  cost  of  this  plant  has  been  high.  To  date  the  sum 
expended  is  about  $165,000.  When  completed  it  will  go 
over  $200,000.  This  could  not  be  met  even  by  all  the 
prosperous  communities  of  this  district  by  direct  taxation, 
so  the  district  was  bonded,  thus  giving  the  generation  that 
receives  the  educational  benefit  an  opportunity  to  help  pay 
the  expenses.  Consolidation  and  bonding  thus  enable  the 
building  of  big  institutions  without  the  assumption  of  an 
unbearable  burden. 

This  building  will  accommodate  750  students.  It  will 
probably  meet  the  needs  of  the  district  for  the  next  eight  or 
ten  years.  The  school  now  enrolls  about  400  students. 
We  present  herewith  the  names  of  the  contributing  towns 
with  distance  from  the  school  and  approximate  population. 


METHODS   AND   FACTS   OF   CONSOLIDATION 


273 


Town 


Distance  in  Miles 


Approximate 
Population 


Midvale 

Union 

Butler 

Granite 

Sandy 

Crescent . . . . 

Draper 

Bluffdale 

Riverton .... 

Herriman 

South  Jordan 
West  Jordan. 
Welby 


3 
3 
6 

5 

I 

3 

5 
1 
6 
12 
3 
S 
7 


1,100 
700 
400 

275 
1,07s 

350 
900 
250 

975 
300 
600 
900 
100 


The  transportation  is  free  and  is  carried  on  by  the  dis- 
trict mostly  in  automobile  vans. 

Coming  as  these  students  do  from  small  communities, 
ranging  from  1,000  inhabitants  down  to  100,  high-school 
opportunities  would  not  have  been  accessible  to  them  had 
it  not  been  for  consolidation. 

The  school  is  large  enough  to  give  breadth  of  scope  to 
its  activities.  It  has  the  usual  social  and  athletic  activities. 
In  addition  it  has  a  broad  curriculum,  flexible  enough  so 
that  students  can  find  something  to  fit  their  native  bent. 

The  school  here  represented  and  all  the  elementary 
schools  that  feed  it  are  administered  by  a  board  of  five 
broad-minded  men  who  work  not  for  particular  constitu- 
encies, but  for  the  people  of  the  entire  county. 

Under  the  old  district  system  over  fifty  men  as  trustees 
would  have  administered  separate  schools  without  -even  a 
possibility  of  high-school  work.  This  administration  of 
the  education  of  all  these  communities  with  one  central 
high  school  by  a  board  of  five  big  men  who  engage  a  com- 
petent superintendent  is  attained  in  these  rural  communi- 
ties only  by  means  of  consolidation. 

Consolidation  thus  enables  rural  communities  to  estab- 


274  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

lish  modern  high  schools.  The  plant  including  campus, 
building,  and  equipment  is  of  the  best  type.  The  curriculum 
is  broad  enough  in  its  scope  to  give  opportunity  for  the 
development  of  individuality.  The  curriculum  and  social 
activities  of  the  school  are  adapted  to  the  environment  and 
to  the  needs  of  the  community.  Without  consolidation 
high  schools  of  any  sort  are  beyond  reach  of  the  smaller 
communities.  The  so-called  one  and  two  teacher  high 
schools  in  the  slightly  larger  communities  are  not  modern, 
because,  even  if  the  administrators  are  converted  to  modern 
ideas,  they  are  limited  in  their  power  and  cannot  embody 
the  features  named  above  that  characterize  a  modern  high 
school.  Schools  may  exist  in  the  twentieth  century  in  coun- 
try or  in  city  and  not  be  modern.  But,  with  the  proper 
view-point,  and  with  an  enabling  law  such  as  is  now  in  effect 
in  our  State,  a  modern  high  school  ought  shortly  to  be  within 
reach  of  every  eligible  child  in  Utah.  For  other  counties 
and  States  it  may  be  better  to  have  several  consolidated 
schools  in  each  county  and  not  have  such  large,  separate 
county  high  schools,  but  here  the  people  nearly  all  live  in 
the  towns  mentioned,  not  in  the  open  country,  and  the  little 
children  are  well  cared  for  in  the  elementary  town  schools. 
We  have  met  the  situation  as  we  found  it,  and  have  an 
almost  unique  high  school. 

V.    The  Sargent  CoNSOLroATED  School  and  Com- 
munity Church,  Colorado 

One  day  in  the  simimer  of  191 6  more  than  100  people 
from  two  communities  in  Rio  Grande  County  who  were 
interested  in  consolidation  visited  the  La  Jara  consolidated 
school.  The  trip  was  made  in  autos  and  some  of  the  people 
came  more  than  50  miles.  They  took  lunch-baskets  and 
spent  the  day  inspecting  this  remarkable  school.  At  noon 
they  were  served  hot  coffee  and  cocoa  by  the  domestic-sci- 
ence class.    After  a  pleasant  and  profitable  day  they  re- 


METHODS  AND  FACTS  OF  CONSOLIDATION  27$ 

turned  home.  One  of  the  communities  is  situated  eight 
miles  north  of  Monte  Vista.  All  were  convinced  of  the 
merits  of  consolidation.  An  election  was  immediately  called 
in  five  districts  and  carried  by  an  overwhelming  majority. 
By  this  time  it  was  too  late  in  the  summer  to  think  of  get- 
ting a  new  building  ready  for  the  approaching  school  year, 
so  school  was  opened  in  the  old  buildings  while  the  school 
board  was  completing  its  plans.  In  February,  191 7,  a  bond 
issue  for  $35,000  carried  without  opposition,  a  competent 
architect  was  employed,  plans  were  drawn,  a  ten-acre  site 
was  donated,  the  contract  was  let,  and  building  operations 
were  begun.  In  the  summer  following,  a  superintendent 
was  employed  who  had  already  made  a  reputation  for  start- 
ing one  famous  consolidated  school,  and  from  this  time  on 
everything  moved  like  clock-work.  People  living  in  ad- 
joining districts  saw  this  fine  school  nearing  completion 
and  were  anxious  to  share  its  benefits.  In  a  short  time  four 
large  transfers  of  territory  from  contiguous  districts  were 
added  by  petition,  making  the  equivalent  of  nine  districts 
in  the  enlarged  consolidation.  Never  in  the  history  of 
rural-school  improvement  in  Colorado  have  such  united 
efforts  been  put  forth  to  complete  a  school  building,  nor 
has  such  enthusiasm  been  displayed  or  more  complete  and 
hearty  co-operation  been  shown  in  any  community  than 
there  was  in  this  case. 

It  takes  time  to  complete  such  a  building  as  this,  and 
it  was  not  until  January,  191 8,  that  the  new  building  was 
occupied,  being  then  unfinished.  It  was  dedicated  and 
christened  April  23,  at  which  time  fifty  autos  were  parked 
on  the  campus,  and  more  than  300  enthusiastic  country 
people  were  packed  into  the  large  school  and  community 
auditorium  to  witness  the  event  to  which  they  had  looked 
forward  with  so  much  pleasure. 

This  fine  modern  $35,000  school  building  was  scarcely 
finished  when  another  bond  issue  for  $18,000  was  voted. 
From  this,  an  eight-room  building  was  erected  to  serve  as 


276  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

a  home  for  the  superintendent.  A  ten-room  teacherage 
for  the  other  eight  teachers  and  a  garage  40  by  70  feet 
were  constructed  and  a  gymnasium  was  finished  in  the 
school  basement. 

In  this,  one  of  the  most  modern  and  up-to-date  rural- 
school  plants  in  the  United  States,  $72,000  have  already 
been  expended.  These  people  have  not  only  provided  for 
the  present,  but  have  anticipated  their  future  needs  for 
years  to  come. 

The  building  itself  is  complete  in  every  detail.  It  is  a 
beautiful  structure,  well  designed  for  all  the  Unes  of  work 
that  should  be  carried  on  in  a  modern  rural  school.  It 
has  standard  classrooms  sufficient  to  accommodate  500 
children.  It  has  a  large  school  and  community  auditorium 
for  both  school  and  neighborhood  meetings.  It  has  well- 
equipped  agricultural  and  domestic-science  laboratories  and 
a  manual-training  shop,  these  three  lines  of  work  being  in- 
troduced the  first  year.  Thirty  boys,  each  of  whom  owns 
a  registered  gilt,  have  organized  a  pig  club.  Already  pig- 
pens and  chicken-coops  dot  the  rear  of  the  ten-acre  school 
site.  A  gasoHne-engine  furnishes  water  under  pressure  for 
drinking-fountains,  lavatories,  and  toilets,  and  generates 
electricity  for  lighting  the  building  as  well  as  for  charging 
the  storage  batteries  of  the  auto-busses  used  in  transporta- 
tion. It  is  still  further  utilized  as  laboratory  equipment  in 
the  study  of  electricity  and  auto  repair. 

Two  hundred  and  eight  children  enrolled  the  first  year, 
30  of  these  being  in  the  new  high  school. 

About  350  school  children  now  live  in  the  district,  and 
it  is  estimated  that  over  300  of  these  will  be  in  school  next 
year  with  about  50  of  the  number  in  the  high  school. 

Last  year  180  children  were  transported  to  and  from 
school  in  five  large  Studebaker  busses,  a  few  riding  14  miles 
each  way.  Three  more  busses  of  the  same  kind  have  been 
purchased,  and  next  year  at  least  300  children  will  be  trans- 
ported. 


METHODS  AND  FACTS  OF  CONSOLIDATION 


277 


All  of  the  nine  teachers,  each  of  whom  has  had  either 
college  or  normal  training,  are  nicely  and  comfortably  pro- 
vided for  in  the  two  large  new  teacher  ages.  No  more 
itinerant  teachers,  coming  into  the  district  Monday  morn- 
ing and  returning  to  some  town  early  Friday  afternoon, 


Basement  Plan  of  Sargent  Consolidated  School. 


will  be  tolerated  in  this  district.  They  will  be  expected 
to  live  in  the  district  and  to  identify  themselves  with  the 
community  life  therein.  Moreover,  each  teacher  will  be 
employed  because  of  special  preparation  and  fitness  for 
work  in  a  rural  school  and  rural  community.  The  superin- 
tendent is  a  young  man  with  a  vision  and  has  already  earned 
a  reputation  as  a  community  builder. 

This  school  has  also  been  approved  for  federal  aid  in 
home  economics  under  the  Smith-Hughes  Act. 

Community  Co-Operation. — The  people  of  this  remarka- 
ble district  have  not  been  content  in  just  improving  their 
school,  even  though  that  improvement  far  surpasses  any 


First  Floor  Plan. 


1 


U 


Second  Floor  Plan. 

Sargent  Consolidated  School,  Monte  Vista,  Colorado. 
John  J.  Huddart,  Architect. 


278 


METHODS  AND  FACTS   OF  CONSOLIDATION  279 

other  district  of  which  we  know,  but  they  have  already 
actually  gone  clear  *'over  the  top''  in  community  co-opera- 
tion. As  soon  as  the  new  building  was  occupied,  they  or- 
ganized a  union  Sunday-school,  which  grew  in  attendance 
rapidly  until  on  Easter  Sunday  the  enrolment  was  299,  the 
average  Sunday  attendance  being  in  the  neighborhood  of 
225,  with  a  men's  Bible  class  of  40,  a  women's  Bible  class 
of  the  same  number,  and  a  cradle  roll  of  30,  which  seems 
to  guarantee  future  attendance. 

The  next  step  was  the  organization  of  a  union  com- 
munity church.  A  pastor  who  gives  his  full  time  to  this 
field  was  called  and  his  salary  of  $1,500  was  raised  by  vol- 
untary subscriptions.  He  reached  the  field  in  April,  191 8, 
and  began  work  at  once.  The  church  organization  was 
perfected  in  May,  and  on  June  9,  70  members,  representing 
some  ten  or  a  dozen  different  denominations,  were  received 
into  membership,  11  of  these  being  upon  confession  of  faith. 
On  July  7,  20  more  were  received  into  membership  in  the 
new  church,  making  a  total  of  90  members.  Twenty-four 
of  these  are  adult  males  and  38  adult  females.  There  is 
also  a  Christian  Endeavor  Society  with  an  attendance  of  50. 

This  magnificent  rural-school  building  is  used  five  days 
in  the  week  during  the  school  term  for  the  regular  school 
work,  and  on  Sunday  for  Sunday-school  and  church  services. 
The  large  assembly-room  is  used  for  preaching  services  and 
the  classrooms  for  the  Sunday-school  classes.  It  is  ad- 
mirably adapted  to  serve  this  double  purpose,  thereby  effect- 
ing a  great  saving  to  the  people  of  the  community,  who  do 
not  need  to  expend  additional  money  for  a  separate  building 
which  could  only  be  used  a  few  hours  each  week.  Besides, 
the  fact  that  the  church  services  were  to  be  held  in  the  school- 
house,  a  neutral  building,  open  to  and  belonging  to  every- 
body in  the  district,  made  it  easier  for  the  people  to  forget 
their  denominational  differences  and  unite  in  one  organiza- 
tion, to  worship  at  one  altar  and  to  bring  up  their  children 
in  the  "fear  and  admonition  of  the  Lord,"  instead  of  trying 


28o  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

to  maintain  some  half-dozen  competing  organizations,  none 
of  which  could  ever  hope  to  be  strong  enough  to  be  self- 
supporting.  For  if  any  one  of  these  had  ever  tried  to 
erect  a  building  of  its  own  it  must  have  solicited  the  sup- 
port of  the  entire  community,  and  then  have  had  a  building 
similar  to  some  of  the  old  schoolhouses  which  they  have 
already  abandoned. 

One  year  ago  this  community  had  only  one-room  schools, 
a  struggling  little  Sunday-school  with  but  few  in  atten- 
dance, and  no  church  organization.  There  was  no  central 
community  meeting-place  and  no  community  solidarity. 
To-day  these  people  have  a  modern  school  plant  and  an 
efficient  school  organization,  a  community  church  and 
Sunday-school  that  all  can  take  pride  in  helping  to  support, 
and  the  entire  community  is  learning  to  co-operate  in  the 
solution  of  its  problems.  The  parsonage  has  been  com- 
pleted, making  the  total  cost  of  this  real  consolidated-school 
plant  to  date  about  $72,000.  The  people  seem  to  be  a  unit 
in  the  support  of  both  the  school  and  church,  and  no  objec- 
tion has  yet  been  raised  to  bond  issues  or  tax  levies.  The 
people  seem  to  have  real  inspiration,  the  kind  that  is  con- 
tagious, for  other  communities  near  by,  seeing  the  good  work 
already  accomplished  by  this  district,  are  planning  to  do 
likewise,  and  one  large  consolidation  north  and  two  south 
of  it  are  now  developing.  This  is  perhaps  the  most  con- 
spicuous example  of  complete  community  co-operation  that 
can  be  found  in  Colorado.  They  have  made  more  real 
substantial  progress  in  two  years  since  the  movement  first 
started  than  many  rural  communities  make  in  a  quarter  of 
a  century. 

VI.    Consolidation  Plan  Makes  Good 

Each  successive  year  for  nine  years  consolidation  has 
become  more  favorably  fixed  in  the  minds  of  the  people 
until  now,  in  Granite  school  district, ,  Salt  Lake  County, 


METHODS  AND   FACTS  OF  CONSOLmATION  281 

Utah,  opposition  to  it  is  considered  a  thing  of  the  past. 
Looking  backward  upon  these  years  of  experience,  it  can 
be  said  that  consolidation  has  accomplished,  among  other 
things,  the  following: 

1.  Established  a  deeper  confidence  in  the  schoolman's 
most  vitalizing  agency. 

2.  Brought  first-class  schools  to  the  country  pupils  and 
overcome  the  necessity  of  country  pupils  leaving  their 
homes  to  go  to  city  schools. 

3.  Made  homes  in  the  country  more  desirable  and 
thereby  raised  the  value  of  rural  real  estate. 

4.  Erased  boundary-lines  and  worked  for  the  common 
good  of  all  the  people. 

5.  Stimulated  the  " getting- together "  habit. 

6.  Introduced  the  "transportation  idea"  and  supplied 
better  means  of  travel. 

7.  Caused,  and  is  causing,  better  roads  to  be  built. 

8.  Equahzed  taxation  for  school  purposes  and  the  ad- 
vantages which  result  therefrom. 

9.  Provided  more  funds  for  school  purposes. 

10.  Expended  school  money  more  judiciously. 

11.  Awakened  as  keen,  or  keener,  interest  in  school  elec- 
tions, though  non-partisan,  as  in  general  elections. 

12.  Eliminated  a  multitude  of  district  trustees  of  but 
ordinary  qualifications. 

13.  Created  in  their  place  a  board  of  education  con- 
sisting of  five  very  competent  members. 

PI4.  Abandoned  poor,  isolated  buildings. 
15.  Erected  new,  modern,  central  school  buildings,  with 
improved  lighting,  heating,  and  ventilating  systems. 

16.  Furnished  these  buildings  with  large  halls,  tinted 
walls,  and  ample  blackboards;  and  equipped  them  with 
pianos,  single  desks,  working-tables,  and  other  desirable 
furniture,  as  well  as  adequate  apparatus,  material,  and 
supplies. 

17.  Kept  these  buildings  in  first-class  condition. 


282  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

1 8.  Expanded  school  grounds  to  a  size  which  encour- 
ages organized  outdoor  play  and  the  planting  of  school- 
gardens. 

19.  Graded  these  grounds,  put  down  cement  walks,  and 
installed  sanitary  drinking-fountains. 

20.  Sought  the  assistance  of  the  ablest  specialists  in 
rural  education  that  our  nation  affords. 

21.  Introduced  a  high  quality  of  school  supervision. 

22.  Employed  expert  supervisors  in  primary  methods, 
music,  art,  physical  education,  manual  training,  agriculture, 
and  domestic  crafts. 

23.  Retained  special  help  of  the  juvenile  court  in  work- 
ing with  delinquent  pupils,  and  engaged  the  services  of 
trained  nurses  to  examine  each  pupil  at  least  once  each  week. 

24.  Raised  the  standard  of  efficiency  of  the  whole 
teaching  force. 

25.  Held  a  liberal  number  of  male  teachers  in  the  gram- 
mar grades,  most  of  whom  are  making  teaching  their  Hfe- 
work. 

26.  Put  fewer  pupils  with  each  teacher,  thereby  giving 
the  pupils  more  personal  attention. 

27.  Resulted  in  enrolling  a  larger  percentage  of  the 
school  population. 

28.  Increased  the  percentage  of  daily  attendance  of  this 
increased  enrolment. 

29.  Increased  the  percentage  of  promotions  of  this  in- 
creased attendance  of  this  increased  enrolment. 

30.  Added  at  least  an  average  of  10  days'  attendance 
per  pupil  per  year. 

31.  Reduced  the  percentage  of  failures  and  retentions 
more  than  one-third. 

32.  Overcome,  to  a  considerable  extent,  the  tendency 
to  quit  school  before  graduating. 

33.  Made  a  standard  rural  high  school  possible. 

34.  Inspired  a  high  percentage  of  eighth-grade  graduates 
to  attend  high  school. 


METHODS  AND   FACTS  OF  CONSOLIDATION 

35.  Reduced  truancy  to  a  minimum. 

36.  Classified  and  graded  the  schools  better. 

37.  Came  closer  to  the  real  interests  of  the  children. 

38.  Obtained  the  good- will  and  co-operation  of  patrons. 

39.  Economized  the  time  of  pupils,  teachers,  and  patrons. 

40.  Overcome  local  petty  prejudice;  made  the  remote 
country  child  associate  with  children  of  other  localities; 
gave  him  a  broader  view,  and  extended  his  circle  of  friends 
and  acquaintances. 

41.  Created  social  centres,  with  their  libraries,  Hterary 
societies,  business  and  industrial  organizations,  athletic  asso- 
ciations, and  amusements. 

42.  Fostered  a  taste  for  the  best  that  life  can  give,  and 
enriched  the  whole  life  of  the  people. 

43.  Placed  strong  class  leaders  in  every  school. 

44.  Aroused  enthusiasm  for  healthful  rivalry  and  fair 
competition  in  all  school  work. 

45.  Made  pupils  progressive,  contented,  comfortable, 
and  happy. 

46.  Taught  punctuality  and  dependability  by  example. 

47.  Safeguarded  the  health  of  the  children. 

48.  Emphasized  a  high  moral  tone. 

49.  Formed  a  better  basis  for  the  study  of  the  school  as 
a  factor  of  economics  and  sociology. 

50.  Made  better  school  legislation  necessary. 

PROBLEMS   AND    BIBLIOGRAPHY 

We  leave  the  problems  and  bibliography,  if  any,  here  to  the  in- 
structors, reading-circle  directors,  or  others  to  devise  if  they  think 
them  desirable. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

THE  CURRICULUM  OF  THE  CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  How  should  a  consolidated  school  be  distinguished  by  its  pro- 

gramme of  studies  from  city  schools,  elementary  and  high? 

2.  What  important  rural  needs  for  knowledge,  habits,  and  aspirations 

not  obtainable  outside  of  schools  are  unmet  by  the  present  con- 
solidated-school curricula  ? 

3.  What  advantages  has  a  school  for  sequential  curriculum-making 

in  which  both  elementary  and  high  schools  are  in  the  same 
building?  Need  there  be  a  sharp  mark  of  cleavage  between  ele- 
mentary and  secondary  education?    Why? 

4.  In  what  ways  is  the  consolidated  school  like  the  Gary  schools  in 

organization  and  possibilities  ?  (See  bulletin  on  the  Gary  schools 
published  by  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education  through  the  Gov- 
ernment Printing  Office,  and  the  survey  of  the  Gary  schools,  in 
several  volumes,  published  by  the  General  Education  Board, 
New  York  City.) 

5.  If  possible,  examine  the  programmes  of  study  of  several  consoli- 

dated schools  and  test  them  by  the  principles  expressed  by 
Doctor  Bobbitt  in  his  book  on  "The  Curriculum"  (Houghton 
Mifflin  Co.). 

I.    General  Principles  of  Curriculum  Construction 

The  activities  in  which  children  engage  by  which  are 
produced  the  educational  changes,  physical  and  mental, 
which  society  needs  for  the  accomplishment  of  the  social 
purpose  constitute  the  curriculum.  Society  desires  "life, 
liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness"  for  each  of  its  members 
individually,  and  for  itself  as  a  co-operative  organism.  It 
must  create  individuals  possessed  of  social  knowledge,  habits, 
and  aspirations  developed  in  the  direction  of  vital,  voca- 

284 


THE    CURRICULUM   OF   THE   CONSOLn)ATED   SCHOOL      285 

tional,  avocational,  civic,  and  moral  efficiency.  Thus  will 
the  highest  good  of  the  individual  and  of  the  entire  group 
be  progressively  promoted.  To  acquire  these  efficiencies  for 
promoting  general  welfare  and  happiness,  the  young  are 
stimulated  by  various  means  to  gain  social  insight,  ability, 
and  responsiveness.  They  gain  these  through  co-ordinated 
and  purposeful  activities,  mental  and  physical,  of  the  senses, 
the  emotions,  the  remembering  and  thinking  abilities,  and 
of  the  various  parts  of  the  body. 

Growth  in  these  efficiencies  through  these  activities 
must  be  progressive  and  sequential.  Such  sequence  and 
progress  are  provided  for  many  important  social  efficiencies 
by  the  ordinary  activities  of  the  home.  The  child  learns 
how  to  act  by  acting,  how  to  live  by  living.  Thus  he  learns 
to  walk  and  to  talk,  two  great  accomplishments,  to  partici- 
pate in  many  home  activities,  and  to  "be  good  to  live  with.'* 
His  instincts  of  play,  imitation,  curiosity,  communication, 
and  many  others  lead  him  to  do  many  things  that  provide 
him  with  definite  and  necessary  forms  of  social  efficiency. 
In  the  colonial  rural  home,  or  "household,'*  practically  all 
the  abihties  needed  for  promoting  individual  and  social 
happiness  were  acquired  at  an  early  age.  There  was  little 
need  for  specialized  institutions  to  add  to  this  training. 
Half  of  the  American  homes  to-day,  however,  are  city 
homes,  and  lack  most  of  the  opportunity  for  broad  home 
education  through  participation.  The  farm  home  has  lost 
much  of  its  educative  value,  both  because  of  the  growing 
speciahzation  and  reduction  in  the  breadth  of  training,  and 
because  of  the  tremendous  increase  of  scientific  knowledge 
and  complexity  of  human  life,  for  much  of  which  the  home 
alone  cannot  well  prepare.  These  facts  might  be  proved 
beyond  the  patience  of  any  reader. 

The  school  is  a  specialized  institution,  usually  of  the 
government,  which  should  do  for  children  educationally 
what  other  institutions  are  not  doing  to  help  them  grow 
best  in  social  efficiency — ^power  to  promote  the  general  wel- 


286  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

fare,  or  universal  happiness  of  the  finest  kinds.  It  is  a 
supplemental  institution.  Children  who  are  being  more 
adequately  and  economically  educated  at  home  for  social 
efficiency  than  they  could  be  at  school  need  not  go  to  school. 
If  the  church  does  a  large  share  of  educational  training,  less 
is  required  of  the  school.  The  superior  school  investigates 
social  needs  and  desires;  it  studies  the  nature  of  the  chil- 
dren; it  learns  what  is  being  done  and  not  being  done  for 
them  educationally  out  of  the  school;  it  determines  the 
limitations  under  which  it  operates;  it  then  attacks  the 
problem  of  selecting  the  most  fundamental  types  of  effi- 
ciency which  it  should  and  can  undertake;  and  finally  ar- 
ranges these  most  essential  activities,  "the  studies,"  pro- 
gressively and  psychologically  for  the  learning  and  teaching 
processes.  These  most  needed  and  most  feasible  activities 
undertaken  by  the  school  constitute  the  curriculum,  or  the 
*' course  of  study,"  as  it  is  frequently  termed,  and,  more 
scientifically,  the  programme  of  studies  which  may  contain 
several  curriculums,  or  courses. 

In  recent  years  we  have  developed  printed  courses,  or 
curriculums,  of  study,  or  activity,  for  many  types  of  effi- 
ciency. Frequently,  the  course  for  each  group  of  abilities, 
such  as  a  statement  of  desirable  knowledge,  skill,  and  ap- 
preciation in  music  or  reading,  is  printed  in  a  separate  vol- 
ume, or  even  in  three  volumes — one  for  the  lower  grades, 
another  for  the  upper  grades,  and  another  for  the  high  school. 
In  some  cases  each  of  these  volumes  is  quite  large  and  in- 
dicates what  activities  to  encourage,  in  what  order,  in  what 
manner,  or  methods,  and  how  to  test  results  of  teaching  in 
the  form  of  socially  desirable  efficiencies.  Recently  pub- 
lished volumes  are  also  setting  up  reasonable  standards  of 
attainment  for  children  of  different  grades  and  kinds.  A 
certain  degree  of  speed  and  comprehension  is,  for  example, 
sought  in  reading  for  each  grade  for  each  natural  grouping 
of  time,  such  as  first  term,  second  term,  etc.,  for  each  year. 

All  of  the  determinants  of  the  public  school  vary  greatly 


THE    CURRICULUM   OF   THE    CONSOLIDATED    SCHOOL      287 

from  place  to  place.  The  country  child,  the  country  life, 
the  country  needs,  the  other  educational  institutions  of  the 
country,  such  as  the  church  and  motion-picture  show,  differ 
widely  in  different  sections  of  the  nation.  The  minimal 
essentials  of  educational  activities  of  the  public  school  as  a 
universal,  supplemental,  compulsory,  and  free  institution, 
dedicated  to  the  welfare  of  the  whole  people,  can  hardly  be 
the  same  for  a  community  of  foreign  coal-miners  living  in 
miserable  shacks  as  for  a  community  of  settled  American 
landowners  in  a  farming  community  when  we  consider  that 
these  essentials  must  relate  to  vital,  vocational,  avocational, 
civic,  and  moral  efficiency.  A  certain  core  of  essentials 
will  be  common,  of  course,  but  this  will  probably  not  be 
large.  Even  the  educational  needs  of  cotton-raisers,  wheat- 
growers,  fruit-raisers,  and  gardeners  differ  greatly,  although 
they  fall  into  common  groups  and  a  certain  core  of  minimal 
essentials  within  each  group  is  to  be  discovered. 

In  another  place  the  writer  has  attempted  to  state  the 
leading  principles  underlying  the  course  of  study,  or  cur- 
riculum of  activities,  for  public  schools  ("Teaching  Ele- 
mentary-School Subjects,"  Chapter  I).  The  principles  are 
many,  and  are  as  broad  as  social  philosophy  and  as  prac- 
tical as  current  school  procedure,  yet  very  unsatisfactory  at 
present  since  we  know  so  little  about  either  the  nature  of 
the  child  and  his  growth  toward  social  efficiency,  of  society 
with  its  various  needs  and  modes  of  development,  and  of 
the  best  methods  and  activities  for  bringing  about  mutual 
adjustment  between  the  two  determinants  of  the  process. 
Most  of  the  people  of  the  world  to-day  believe  in  that  type 
of  social  Ufe  which  we  term  democratic.  We  have  waged 
a  war  to  "make  the  world  safe  for  democracy";  we  are 
constantly  improving  the  methods  of  democracy  itself,  and 
thus  making  democracy  safe  for  the  world;  the  public  school 
is  the  principal  institution  for  making  the  people  safe  for 
democracy  and  democracy  safe  for  the  people  by  bringing 
up  the  young  in  the  democratic  mode  of  life.     This  should 


288  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

be  its  chief  and  broadest  aim.  We  must  have  individuals 
from  our  schools  in  great  numbers  who  can  both  live  suc- 
cessfully the  life  of  freedom  and  responsibility,  of  democracy, 
and  to  help  make  that  democracy  better  suited  to  the  nature 
and  needs  of  human  life.  A  summary  of  such  principles 
follows,  not  in  full,  but  those  of  most  significance. 

1.  The  school  curriculum  of  activities  must  be  adapted 
to  the  nature  and  needs  of  society  and  the  children. 

2.  The  aim  of  education  and  society  is  individual  and 
social  happiness  through  social  efficiency  of  all  members. 

3.  The  factors  of  the  aim  of  social  efficiency  may  be 
stated  as  vital,  vocational,  avocational,  civic,  and  moral 
efficiency. 

4.  The  changes  which  can  be  made  in  children  in  the 
direction  of  these  aims  are  both  physical  and  mental  in 
character,  the  latter  being  changes  in  knowledge,  in  habits, 
and  in  feelings;  or,  in  Dewey's  language,  in  insight,  power, 
and  responsiveness,  or  again,  knowledge,  habits,  ideals,  and 
appreciations,  all  of  these  classifications  being  unsatisfactory 
but  helpful  to  a  degree. 

5.  The  public  school  is  a  supplemental  institution  and 
consequently  must  do  what  other  institutions  are  not  doing 
in  promoting  social  efficiency  within  the  limits  of  its  powers. 
No  traditional  notion  of  what  a  school  should  be  must  limit 
it.  Its  function  is  that  of  adapting  the  present  child  as  he 
is  known  and  understood  to  the  present  and  future  society 
as  it  is  known  and  understood.  In  the  farm  community 
there  are  usually  few  educational  functions  performed  by 
other  institutions  than  the  school  and  home. 

6.  Needless  to  say,  the  rural  consolidated  school  must 
help  young  and  old  to  live  efficiently  in  a  rural  environment, 
and  particularly  in  the  environment  of  the  school.  Whether 
it  should  prepare  the  young  for  city  life  even  though  some 
undoubtedly  will  later  spend  much  of  their  lives  in  cities 
is  a  question  of  social  policy.  Training  in  open-mindedness 
and  adaptability,  and  in  such  knowledge^  habits,  and  feel- 


THE   CURRICULUM  OF   THE   CONSOLIDATED    SCHOOL      289 

ings  as  country  people  need  for  the  best  co-operation  with 
cities  may  be  all  that  is  justified.  In  some  cases,  of  course, 
a  class  may  be  formed  of  those  surely  going  to  the  city,  and 
this  work,  say  a  course  in  commercial  work,  may  be  worth 
more  to  the  State  than  what  it  eliminates.  However,  much 
of  the  money  now  spent  on  rural  education  benefits  the  city 
rather  than  the  country,  since  so  many  leave  the  farm  in 
early  life  for  the  city.  Perhaps  rural  education  should  be 
strictly  rural,  and  devoted  to  adapting  most  children  to 
country  and  rural  village  life.  This  is  certainly  its  dominant 
and  essential  aim,  but  not  to  be  interpreted  too  narrowly. 
Each  person  must  be  a  citizen  of  his  State,  his  nation,  and 
of  the  world. 

7.  There  should  be  eliminated  from  the  course,  or  not 
included,  all  that  is 

(a)  Not  plainly  and  directly  related  to  furthering  the 
fivefold  aim  of  education. 

(b)  Less  valuable  for  promotion  of  the  aim  than  any- 
thing that  can  be  substituted, 

(c)  Not  highly  useful  to  a  majority  of  the  pupils  or  to 
the  majority  of  a  group  that  is  legitimately  specializing  in 
some  field  of  study. 

(d)  Being  effectively  taught  to  all  or  a  majority  of  the 
pupils  by  outside  institutions  such  as  the  home,  the  voca- 
tion, the  church,  the  recreational  activities  of  the  com- 
munity, the  Y.  M.  and  Y.  W.  C.  A.'s,  and  the  government 
through  military  drill,  agricultural  agents,  etc. 

(e)  Not  comprehensible  nor  interesting  to  pupils,  except 
as  it  is  a  minimal  essential  and  so  must  be  taught  whether 
interesting  or  not,  and  may  be  retained  until  it  becomes 
comprehensible  later  in  life. 

(/)  Isolated  and  irrelevant,  or  cannot  be  connected  up 
in  the  mind  in  such  organization  as  will  insure  its  retention 
until  used  and  fixed. 

(g)  Detrimental  to  initiative  evoked  in  pupils  and  teach- 
ers, to  the  development  of  the  scientific  attitude  and  habit 


290  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

of  mind,  to  training  in  judgment  of  relative  values,  and  to 
following  worthy  purposes. 

(h)  Of  such  character  as  cannot  be  adequately  taught 
in  a  school. 

To  these  other  principles  may  be  added,  but  these  cer- 
tainly provide  for  the  elimination  of  most  relatively  unde- 
sirable subject-matter. 

8.  Arrange  the  subject-matter  selected  on  the  basis  of 
the  above  principles  as 

(a)  Minimally  essential  subject-matter,  or  activities, 
surely  needed  by  all. 

{b)  Alternative  subject-matter  where  choice  of  several 
required  groups  of  subject-matter  is  left  to  teachers. 

{c)  Optional  subject-matter,  which  may  or  may  not  be 
taught,  as  the  teacher  chooses,  as  time  permits,  or  individual 
ability  and  preference  of  pupils  indicate. 

9.  The  following  principles  must  also  be  kept  in  mind: 
{a)  The  ability  of  the  teachers  available  must  be  consid- 
ered; the  amount  of  teaching  they  can  do  in  a  given  time, 
their  need  of  detailed  or  general  directions  and  suggestions 
as  to  aims,  methods,  topics  or  problems,  devices,  etc. 

{b)  The  most  economical,  pleasant,  and  natural  methods 
and  sequence  of  learning  and  growth,  physical  and  mental, 
on  the  part  of  the  children  must  be  paralleled  by  the  or- 
ganization and  sequence  of  the  curriculum. 

{c)  The  arrangement  should  promote,  not  hinder,  the 
best  methods  of  teaching,  such  as  the  problem  method,  in 
which  a  problem  or  project  rather  than  a  topic  is  the  basis 
of  learning;  and  such  as  the  group,  co-operative,  or  demo- 
cratic, method  of  study  and  recitation  instead  of  the  indi- 
vidualistic, strongly  or  exclusively  competitive  methods  so 
much  in  vogue. 

{d)  Where  there  are  grades  and  terms,  "years"  and 
"half-years,"  as  customary,  the  work  should  show  approxi- 
mately these  divisions  of  progress  expected  in  general,  with 
large  freedom  for  individual  and  particular-class  variation. 


THE    CURRICULUM   OF   THE   CONSOLmATED   SCHOOL      29I 

{e)  The  arrangement  should  foster  iextended  appliccition 
of  what  is  learned  to  the  every-day  practical  affairs  of  living. 

Home  and  farm  projects  should  go  along  with  school  learn- 
ing.    Civic  projects  will  also  be  used  more  than  in  the  past. 

10.  The  curriculum  should  lead  teachers  to  place  em- 
phasis not  so  much  on  ground  covered,  pages  studied,  things 
made,  songs  sung,  experiments  written  up,  and  problems 
solved  as  upon  the  chamges  of  an  educative  character  in  the  di- 
rection of  the  five  aims  made  in  the  children  and  in  social  life, 

11.  The  curriculum  should  be  so  expressed,  selected, 
arranged,  and  printed  as  to  make  it  a  convenient  and  easily 
used  tool  in  the  teaching  process,  guiding  effort,  furnishing 
suggestions  and  inspiration,  correlating  the  activities  of  a 
number  of  persons  who  must  work  co-operatively  on  the 
joint  problem  of  child  and  nation  building.  Growth  in 
power  of  complete  living,  in  ability  to  promote  one's  own 
and  the  world's  highest  happiness  and  well-being  is  the 
broad  test  of  the  child's  profit  from  the  use  of  the  course  of 
study.  Rapidity  and  normality  of  such  growth  may  be 
secured  partly  by  use  of  the  rapidly  improving  standardized 
tests  of  educative  changes  along  lines  of  the  school  studies 
and  activities.  The  immediate  future  is  bright  with  promise 
for  an  education  that  the  common  man  can  see  at  a  glance 
is  vital  and  essential,  and  that  can  be  objectively  tested  to 
prove  the  character  and  degrees  of  progress  made. 

To  apply  these  principles  in  the  selection,  organization, 
and  application  of  a  rural  curriculum  is  very  difficult  be- 
cause such  a  course  must  be  worked  out  over  a  number  of 
years  experimentally,  and  because  the  principles  are  so 
numerous  and  comparatively  vague.  The  federal  Bureau 
of  Education  has  been  struggling  with  the  problem  for  some 
time.  We  imperatively  need  to-day  fifty  avowedly  experi- 
mental consolidated  schools  in  various  parts  of  the  country 
for  the  discovery  of  what  rural  education  should  be.  If  our 
classification  of  the  problems  of  life,  or  factors  of  social 
efficiency,  is  correct,  namely,  that  of  vital,  vocational,  avoca- 


292  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

tional,  civic,  and  moral  efficiency,  we  should  expect  some 
activities  in  the  school  corresponding  to  each  division  and 
contributing  to  each  type,  if  outside  agencies  are  not  sup- 
plying the  training  for  one  or  more  entire  aims. 

We  offer  below  a  few  suggestions  for  each  group  of  these 
social  aims  of  education  in  country  communities: 

A.  Vital  Efficiency.^ — i.  Medical  supervision  of  the  chil- 
dren by  doctors,  nurses,  and  teachers,  with  such  instruction 
and  training  of  the  children  as  shall  be  found  necessary  to 
help  them  do  and  understand  what  they  should  do  to  co- 
operate best  to  improve  their  health  is  necessary  and  essen- 
tial. This  instruction  and  training  must  go  into  the  home 
and  help  the  child  wherever  he  is  to  practise  such  curative 
measures  as  may  be  necessary,  and  to  prevent  disease  and 
defects.  Vital  efficiency  is  the  first  aim  of  education,  the 
corner-stone  of  the  structure. 

2.  School  sanitation  and  home  sanitation  afford  a  field  of 
practice  in  which  the  children  can  learn  "the  reason  why" 
and  "do  the  deed  through  which  to  understand  the  doc- 
trine." All  can  be  led  to  co-operate  to  make  the  school, 
home,  and  community  environment  sanitary.  Eliminating 
conditions  making  for  the  spread  of  hookworm,  typhoid,  bad 
colds,  tuberculosis,  malaria,  and  other  ailments  in  a  practical 
manner  through  actual  participation  would  be  a  part  of  the 
school's  purpose  and  curriculum.  The  congressional  hear- 
ings on  rural  sanitation  and  the  various  reports  on  the 
subject  by  the  federal  Public  Health  Service  should  be 
used  and  applied  to  the  locality. 

3.  Physical  education  must  in  some  form  be  a  part  of 
the  activities  of  every  school  through  play,  physical  work, 
Boy-Scout  and  Girl-Scout  activities,  gymnasium  training 
of  a  more  formal  character,  etc.  Excellent  physical-educa- 
tion curricula  are  being  introduced  in  the  schools  of 
many  States  by  the  departments  of  education  (as  in  New 

^The  writer's  volumes  on  "  Educational  Hygiene  "  (Scribners)  and  "  Rural 
School  Hygiene  "  (in  preparation)  deal  with  this  fivefold  problem. 


THE    CURRICULUM   OF   THE    CONSOLIDATED    SCHOOL      293 

Jersey)  for  use  by  all  schools.  Special  adaptations  of  these 
for  the  consolidated  school  and  country  conditions  are  being 
made  by  progressive  educators  in  many  States.  Rural 
recreation  and  physical  development  can  be  combined,  and 
will  do  much  to  raise  the  present  low  standard  of  physical 
development  of  country  people  disclosed  by  surveys  and 
army  examinations. 

4.  Hygiene  instruction  through  definite  and  practical 
teaching  of  knowledge,  habits,  ideals,  and  appreciations  ap- 
plied to  life  situations  and  problems  of  health,  facing  pupils 
and  country  people  in  general,  must  also  be  emphasized,  since 
"health  is  the  first  wealth,"  and  our  people  perish  for  want 
of  health  knowledge  and  training.  Personal,  public,  voca- 
tional (agricultural),  and  domestic  hygiene  must  be  taught 
and  practised.  Selections  of  subject-matter  must  be  made 
from  the  stand-point  of  rural  problems  and  needs.  A  knowl- 
edge of  reading  is  a  necessary  basis  for  such  teaching  in  the 
upper  grades  as  it  is  for  other  forms  of  efficiency  to-day. 

5.  Hygienic  methods  of  teaching,  managing,  and  guiding 
pupils  must  be  taught  teachers,  and  these  must  teach  pupils 
and  train  them  in  mental  hygiene  and  the  psychology  of 
healthy-minded  living.  The  hygiene  of  joy,  the  philosophy 
of  "being  good  to  live  with,"  the  spirit  of  "sweetness  and 
light,"  "power  through  repose,"  making  others  in  the  school 
happy,  and  thereby  healthy,  and  the  entire  influence  of 
mind  over  body  must  in  some  way,  without  sentimentality, 
be  made  a  living  characteristic  of  the  school.  Formal, 
mihtary,  slave-driving,  prescriptive,  inquisitorial,  and  con- 
demnatory methods  must  be  changed  for  those  that  are 
democratic,  optimistic,  co-operative,  generous,  gracious,  and 
encouraging. 

B.  Vocational  Efficiency. — i.  Domestic  efficiency  is  the 
efficiency  of  the  members  of  the  home,  and  especially  of  "  the 
woman  of  the  house."  Supplementary  to  and  correlated 
with  the  home,  this  work  for  the  girls  must  take  in  the 
entire  range  of  activities  of  the  home,  not  alone  cooking  and 


294  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

sewing,  and  help  where  help  is  needed.  Necessarily  such 
work  will  vary  much  in  its  optional  and  fringe  content  from 
community  to  community.  In  Porto  Rico,  for  example, 
much  or  most  of  the  content  found  desirable  in  American 
courses  is  found  undesirable  and  unrelated  to  human  needs. 
How  to  cook  and  can  apples  is  of  little  significance  to  those 
who  have  no  apples.  How  to  purchase  and  care  for  carpets 
and  rugs  is  of  little  or  no  value  where  such  things  are  not 
used  and  are  undesirable  or  impossible  of  use.  Parts  of  the 
United  States  vary  almost  as  much  from  each  other  as 
Porto  Rico  does  from  the  continent. 

2.  Agricultural  efficiency  depends  upon  a  common  basis 
of  agricultural  knowledge  and  practice,  closely  related  to 
conditions  for  both  sexes  and  for  various  groups,  and  upon 
specialization  for  groups  requiring  different  kinds  of  school 
help  because  they  have  different  kinds  of  farm  problems. 
One  group  of  pupils  may  well  spend  considerable  time  on 
the  raising  of  potatoes,  while  another  group  in  the  same 
school  may  need  little  instruction  in  detail  on  potato-raising, 
but  much,  for  example,  on  fruit-raising  or  corn  culture. 
Such  specialization  may  be  made  possible  especially  for 
those  of  the  upper  grades  and  high  school.  Dairying,  animal 
husbandry,  gardening,  bee-keeping,  fruit  culture,  raising 
cereals,  rotation  of  crops,  recovering  old  soils,  irrigation, 
dry-land  farming,  and  hundreds  of  other  topics  suggest 
problems  of  intense  practical  value  in  many  parts  of  the 
country.  How  much  time  can  be  devoted  to  such  activi- 
ties, including  home  projects  and  other  applications,  must 
be  solved  with  all  social  needs  before  one.  The  social  sur- 
vey of  the  rural  community  is  coming  to  be  the  best  single 
instrument  for  discovering  these  needs  for  vocational  and 
all  other  aims.  The  elementary  essentials  of  arithmetic, 
closely  applied,  will  be  needed  here,  also  simple  reading, 
writing,  and  the  spelling  of  words  needed  in  letter- writing. 

3.  Teaching  efficiency  may  be  an  aim  for  a  special  division 
of  the  rural  high  school  in  many  consolidated  communities. 


Agriculture  is  the  central  subject  in  rural  education 


A  class  in  botany  at  a  summer  school 


THE   CURRICULUM   OF   THE   CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL      295 

In  a  number  of  States  the  rural  schools  have  been  so  poorly 
provided  with  teachers  by  the  normal  schools  that  teacher- 
training  departments  have  been  instituted  in  hundreds  of 
high  schools  in  the  last  few  years.  Where  there  are  many 
single-room  schools  still  in  use,  as  will  be  true  for  much  of 
the  present  century,  and  while  normal  schools  are  so  few 
and  inadequately  supported,  these  divisions  may  be  of  as 
much  value  to  the  community  and  the  nation  as  anything 
they  displace  from  the  curriculum  or  school.  They  cannot 
be  provided,  of  course,  where  there  are  only  sufficient  teach- 
ers to  handle  the  non-specialized  branches,  the  "core  cur- 
riculum." Minnesota  and  other  States  have  solved  this  by 
designating  one  high  school  in  each  county  as  a  teachers'- 
training  school,  to  have  such  a  department,  and  provide 
generous  State  aid  therefor. 

4.  Professional  preparation  may  in  some  cases  be  pro- 
vided also  for  those  who  are  going  to  higher  schools,  and 
thus  require  subjects  required  for  entrance.  Only  when  a 
sufficiently  large  group  make  a  fair-sized  class  should  such 
work  be  provided,  unless  the  school  is  much  larger  than 
usual,  with  a  number  of  elective  courses.  In  certain  cases, 
too,  commercial  courses  can  be  provided,  but  are  not  funda- 
mental to  the  big  aim  of  the  rural  school,  which  must  be 
dominantly  and  concentratedly  directed  toward  rural  life 
and  country  needs.  Force  the  higher  schools,  especially 
the  State  colleges  and  universities,  to  admit  graduates  of 
four-year  high  schools  when  their  work  has  been  good, 
regardless  largely  of  subjects  taken,  and  this  problem  is 
solved.  This  great  problem  of  the  hampering  of  all  high- 
school  development  is  candidly  dealt  with  in  the  following 
chapter. 

C.  Avocational  Efficiency. — Avocational  efficiency  is  a 
term  used  to  apply  to  that  efficiency  which  makes  for  the 
right  use  of  leisure,  ability  to  enjoy  life  and  to  engage  in 
worthy  recreations  and  wholesome  enjoyments.  In  a 
democracy,  as  Inglis  has  pointed  out,  a  person  is  first  of  all 


296  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

a  citizen  with  the  problems  of  good  citizenship  in  a  democ- 
racy; secondly,  he  is  a  worker  and  producer  of  wealth  for 
himself  and  others,  and  thirdly,  he  is  an  individual  with 
certain  personal  interests  and  activities,  a  consumer  of  goods, 
and  an  enjoyer  of  pleasures.^  One  has  relations  to  himself, 
to  his  work,  and  to  his  country,  so  to  speak.  Training  for 
avocation,  for  the  eight  hours  or  so  of  leisure  apart  from 
work  and  sleep,  we  have  discussed  in  two  later  chapters. 
Here  we  may  call  attention  to  it  as  a  factor  largely  over- 
looked in  American  rural  education,  although  it  was  the 
chief  aim  of  the  glorious  Athenian  education  of  old.  A 
teacher  of  a  rural  school  was  once  asked  by  the  writer  why 
she  did  not  use  an  organ  stored  in  a  back  corner  of  the 
school,  and  why  she  did  not  have  singing  at  opening  exer- 
cises. She  replied  that  the  parents  of  that  district  '^did  not 
believe  in  such  things" — that  they  thought  that  such 
*' things"  were  a  waste  of  time,  and  that,  although  she  could 
play  the  organ  and  sing,  she  didn't  dare  to  take  the  time  of 
the  pupils  for  such  activities,  because  the  patrons  wanted 
her  to  put  the  time  in  on  arithmetic  and  such  studies.  Yet 
country  people  frequently  slave  themselves  to  an  early 
death,  or  to  lives  of  only  partial  happiness  and  real  efficiency, 
because  of  a  lack  of  a  training  and  appreciation  for  avoca- 
tions and  suitable  enjoyments. 

Country  children  need  to  know  how  to  play  and  enjoy 
many  games,  to  learn  the  delights  of  reading  and  how  to 
continue  these  pleasures  after  school-days  are  over,  to  get 
esthetic  satisfaction  from  the  many  things  of  beauty  in  the 
world,  to  learn  to  enjoy  the  natural  and  social  sciences  and 
intellectual  activity  for  self -development  and  pleasures  in 
the  every-day  world,  to  gain  the  delights  of  imagination 
and  its  aeroplane  flights  over  the  noisy  world — in  short, 
to  gain  happiness  very  immediately  and  directly  in  accord 
with  the  natural  instincts  of  life  and  social  necessities.     Such 

Un  "Principles  of  Secondary  Education."     See  also  Bobbitt's  volume 
on  "The  Curriculum"  and  Parker's  "Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  Schools." 


THE    CURRICULUM   OF   THE    CONSOLIDATED    SCHOOL      297 

recreational  and  avocational  activities  should  make  the  labor 
side  of  life  more  pleasurable  and  efficient.  Joy  in  work  is 
impossible  when  the  latter  is  degraded  into  drudgery  by 
overspecializing  in  this  one  phase  of  life.  The  eight-hour 
day,  improved  farm  machinery,  the  growing  number  of 
holidays  and  more  recreational  use  of  Sundays,  the  auto- 
mobile, and  many  other  similar  factors  are  forcing  schools 
to  give  more  attention  to  education  for  avocation.  How 
much  of  literature,  play,  athletics,  constructive  work,  dram- 
atization, music,  dancing,  motion-pictures,  festivals,  fairs, 
entertainments,  assembly  exercises,  "socials,"  receptions, 
parties,  travelogues,  speeches,  debates,  oratoricals,  nature- 
study  clubs,  camera  clubs,  literary  societies,  spelling  and 
ciphering  matches,  etc.,  are  needed  by  the  community 
and  how  much  can  and  should  be  encouraged  at  the  school 
is  a  matter  of  careful  study  and  good  judgment.  The 
tendency  is  for  much  more  time  to  be  spent  in  these  direc- 
tions which  are  so  valuable  for  personal  and  social  culture  and 
happiness.     Happiness  is  the  goal  of  life,  not  a  stolen  sweet. 

D.  Civic  Efficiency. — Civic  efficiency  in  a  democracy  is 
second  to  no  other  efficiency,  and  is  probably  more  neglected 
in  American  education  than  any  other,  with  the  probable 
exception  of  vital  efficiency.  General,  unapplied  education 
will  not  produce  citizenship  and  save  the  world  through 
democracy  any  more  than  general  unapplied  education  will 
make  physicians  and  lawyers.  Training  for  democracy  is 
like  training  for  any  profession  or  trade,  and  definite  knowl- 
edge, skill,  and  attitudes  are  necessary  that  are  closely  re- 
lated to  co-operative  effort  for  community  and  national 
progress.  Pupils  will  not  know  how  to  work  together,  will 
not  have  skill  to  work  together,  will  not  have  the  ideal  and 
initiative  for  working  together  without  special  training  be- 
yond what  is  given  by  customary  non-school  agencies. 

Community  civics  is  now  coming  to  be  an  important 
subject  and  activity  in  all  grades,  for  study,  for  practice, 
for  every-day  living.     Co-operative  methods  of  study,  of 


298  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

play,  of  constructive  work,  of  community  improvement, 
beginning  with  the  school  environment,  are  to-day  in  the 
best  schools  working  the  spirit  of  democracy  into  the  very 
warp  and  woof  of  the  children's  lives.  The  work  of  the 
school  as  a  social  centre  is  keeping  the  habits  and  spirit 
alive  in  those  who  have  left  the  school  and  engendering  it  in 
the  lives  of  others  who  have  not  attended  in  the  days  since 
schools  have  begun  to  carry  on  a  democratic  Hfe.  There  is 
hardly  anything  good  that  can  be  conceived  as  practically 
desirable  for  a  community  that  cannot  be  started  and 
pushed  through  to  realization  by  a  school  working  in  the 
spirit  of  democracy.  Good  roads,  consolidation,  co-opera- 
tive stores,  creameries,  elevators,  and  laundries,  better 
churches,  improved  recreational  facilities,  better  govern- 
ment officials,  improved  methods  of  farming,  greater  use  of 
the  State  and  national  governments  for  helping  farmers, 
and  so  on — all  may  spring  from  proper  civic  education  in 
schools.    North  Dakota  is  setting  an  example. 

Citizenship  courses,  Hterature  developing  high  and  at- 
tainable civic  ideals,  emphasis  on  the  social  and  civic  aspects 
of  several  subjects,  such  as  history  and  geography,  as  well 
as  actual  learning  to  do  by  doing,  becoming  a  citizen  by 
being  a  citizen  up  to  one's  powers,  must  in  some  way  be 
incorporated  in  the  curriculum  even  at  the  expense  of  some 
of  the  old-time  formal  grammar,  impractical  arithmetic,  the 
non-English  languages  and  non-arithmetical  mathematics, 
rhetoric,  and  the  spelling  of  long  lists  of  words  never  used 
in  letter-writing.  Ability  to  speak  and  to  write  simple 
EngHsh  correctly  will  be  desirable  here.  Training  in  public 
speaking  will  be  a  regular  part  of  the  school  Hfe.  The  U.  S. 
Bureau  of  Education  has  been  doing  excellent  work  in  this 
field,  and  has  printed  valuable  pamphlets  on  the  subject. 
Some  opposition  to  these  community  lessons  issued  by  the 
federal  Bureau  of  Education  was  made  by  a  manufacturers' 
association,  but  civic  instruction  and  the  people's  rights 
cannot  be  successfully  denied.     Civic  efficiency  will  grow 


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A  school  agricultural  exhibit  in  the  PhiUppines 


THE    CURRICULUM   OF   THE    CONSOLIDATED    SCHOOL      299 

up  as  naturally  in  the  civically  directed  consolidated  school 
as  will  vocational  efficiency,  or  any  other,  when  proper  time 
and  attention  are  devoted  to  it  effectively. 

E.  Moral  Efficiency. — Moral  efficiency  probably  re- 
quires special  attention  in  most  schools,  although  the  ideal 
is,  perhaps,  to  gain  morality  by  living  morally  and  gaining 
the  precepts  incidentally  in  connection  with  ever-recurring 
moral  problems.  However,  accurate  ethical  knowledge, 
habits,  ideals,  and  appreciations  are  undoubtedly  promoted 
very  much  by  something  more  than  incidental  attention. 
As  citizenship  is  acquired  through  careful,  sequential  educa- 
tion, so  morality  can  and  must  be  strengthened  by  moral 
education.  Here  the  co-operative  training  and  study  for 
citizenship  also  plays  into  the  hands  of  morality.  Literature 
may  be  selected  for  reading,  as  shown  in  a  later  chapter,  that 
tends  to  develop  each  of  the  great  racial  ideals  necessary  for 
the  common  Kfe,  the  life  of  the  present-day  rural  community, 
and  for  meeting  the  great  temptations  as  well  as  opportuni- 
ties in  modern  complex  civilization.  In  some  schools  se- 
quential courses  in  moral  training,  or  moral  instruction, 
have  been  successfully  introduced.^  While  there  is  danger 
of  making  little  prigs  and  "goody-goodies"  with  poor  teach- 
ers, yet  with  able  supervision,  carefully  prepared  curric- 
ulums,  and  a  great  deal  of  attention  to  texts,  devices, 
methods,  selections,  and  suggestions,  much  can  be  accom- 
plished not  now  being  attempted  by  either  home,  church, 
or  school  to  raise  the  level  of  moral  efficiency  in  the  greater 
rural  neighborhood.  At  present,  considerable  attention  is 
being  paid  to  moral  instruction.  The  United  States  Moral- 
ity Codes  encouraged  by  the  Bureau  of  Education  will  be 
of  help  in  this  movement,  as  are  also  the  various  texts  de- 
vised for  morning  exercises  and  classroom  instruction. 

Without  going  into  further  detail,  we  can  illustrate  the 
method  of  keeping  educational  aims  and  the  changes  which 

^  See  Sharp,  "  Moral  Instruction,"  Bobbs-Merrill  Co. 


3CDO 


THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 


can  be  made  in  children,  physically  and  mentally,  before  one 
by  the  accompanying  chart.  At  the  left  are  the  five  great 
phases  of  social  efficiency  as  aims  of  education,  while  at  the 
right  are  some  of  the  appropriate  general  changes  to  be  pro- 
duced in  children  in  the  direction  of  these  efiiciencies.  The 
chart  is  largely  self-evident  after  the  preceding  explanation. 
The  essentials  of  the  three  R's,  or  tool  subjects,  are  neces- 
sary, of  course.  Other  classifications  of  both  the  aims  and 
the  changes  are  possible.  At  the  left  might  be  individual, 
civic,  and  vocational  ejQ&ciency,  and  at  the  right  the  changes, 
physical  and  mental,  the  latter  stated  as  changes  in  knowl- 
edge, skills,  and  feelings. 


EDUCATIONAL  AIMS  AND  EDUCATIONAL  CHANGES  IN  PUPILS 


Social 
Efficiency 

Physical 
Changes 

Mental  Changes 

Knowledge 

Habits 

Ideals 

Appreciations 

I 
Vital 

efficiency 

n 

Vocational 
efficiency 

ni 

Avocational 
efficiency 

IV 

Civic 
efficiency 

V 

Moral 
efficiency 

Removal  of  ade- 
noids,   building 
up  physique 

Physical     prepa- 
ration for  voca- 
tion 

Physical  changes 
due      to     right 
avocations 

Any   physical 
changes  related 
to  citizenship 

Any   physical 
changes   related 
to  moral  living 

Hygiene. 
Health    in- 
struction 

Economics 
and     occu- 
pations 

Knowledge 
of      avoca- 
tions 

Civics. 
Rural    citi- 
zenship 

Ethics. 
Social    ser- 
vice 

Training  in  liv- 
ing    hygienic- 
ally.   The  hab- 
its of  health 

The  habits  and 
skills  of  the  vo- 
cation 

The  habits  and 
skills  of  avoca- 
tions  and  use 
of  leisure 

The    habits    of 
civic  participa- 
tion 

The    habits    of 
the  moral  life 

The    ideals    of 
health  and 
physical      effi- 
ciency 

Ideals  related  to 
industry 

Ideals  of  recrea- 
tions and  avo- 
cations 

Ideals  of  citizen- 
ship 

Ideals  of  moral- 
ity,     religion, 
and  social  ser- 
vice 

The     interests 
and  attitudes 
of  health 

The     interests 
and  attitudes 
of  vocation 

The     interests 
and  attitudes 
of  avocations 

The     interests 
and  attitudes 
of  citizenship 

The     interests 
and  attitudes 
of  the   moral 
life 

CHAPTER   XIV 

THE  CURRICULUM  OF  THE  CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL 

(continued) 

II.    Programmes  of  Study 

The  curriculum  for  the  elementary  school  would  contain 
subject-matter  selected  and  arranged  on  the  above  prin- 
ciples, and  would  be  selected  from  hygiene,  physical  training, 
play  activities,  elementary  rural  economics,  agriculture, 
domestic  science,  home  projects,  gardening  (except  in  regions 
where  gardening  is  impossible  or  is  being  provided  by  out- 
side agencies),  farm  arithmetic,  simple  English  composition 
with  emphasis  on  letter-writing,  spelling  of  one  or  two 
thousand  words  most  used  in  rural  correspondence  by  chil- 
dren and  adults,  such  few  elements  of  grammar  applied  as 
really  help  children  in  improving  oral  and  written  composi- 
tion, probably  not  to  be  taught  at  all  as  a  separate  subject 
but  in  close  connection  with  composition  and  ordinary 
speech,  the  most  usable  and  attractive  phases  of  geography 
and  history,  elementary  science  for  vital,  vocational,  and 
avocational  efficiency,  especially  music,  including  par- 
ticularly ability  and  delight  in  singing  fifty  or  more  of  the 
great  "community  songs,"  such  elements  of  drawing  and 
fine  art  as  can  successfully  compete  for  a  place  in  the  school 
and  home  lives  of  country  boys  and  girls  in  competition 
with  other  subjects,  civics,  biography,  reading,  writing, 
thrift,  good  roads,  rural  sanitation,  elementary  ethics,  farm 
carpentry,  elementary  blacksmithing  and  auto  repair,  methods 
of  co-operation  for  community  enterprises,  life  insurance, 
taxation,  and  other  subjects,  problems,  and  topics. 

We  can  point  to  hardly  any  curriculum  in  the  United 
States  at  the  present  time  satisfactorily  adapted  to  country 
boys  and  girls  in  consolidated  rural  schools.     The  courses 

301 


302  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

published  for  the  rural  schools  (largely  single-room  schools) 
of  Baltimore  County,  Maryland,  are  of  the  new  order,  but 
thoroughgoing  courses  worked  out  on  the  basis  of  a  sound 
philosophy  of  education  and  the  essential  needs  and  prob- 
lems of  a  country  community  educating  its  children  in  con- 
solidated schools  are  yet  to  be  developed.  Here  is  a  great 
opportunity  for  an  organization  of  consolidated-school  prin- 
cipals of  various  States.  A  curriculum  for  the  rural  ele- 
mentary and  high  school  properly  developed  would  make  a 
large  volume,  and  must  be  created  by  years  of  study,  adapta- 
tion, and  experimentation,  leaving  much  opportunity,  of 
course,  for  local  initiative,  adjustment,  and  modification. 

The  elementary-school  curriculum  would  necessarily  have 
to  be  organized  with  reference  to  the  high-school  curriculum, 
especially  since  the  two  schools  are  usually  in  one  building 
in  the  consolidated  school.  In  this,  the  plan  resembles  the 
Gary  system,  in  which  pupils  go  to  the  same  building  for 
twelve  years  if  they  graduate  from  high  school,  and  in  which 
teachers  teach  more  by  departments  of  work,  caring  for 
both  elementary  and  high-school  pupils,  than  by  strict 
horizontal  divisions,  including  certain  years.  In  fact,  many 
of  the  important  and  best  features  of  the  Gary  system  fit  in 
well  with  the  consolidated  rural  school.  We  should,  then, 
expect  most  of  the  work  in  the  consolidated  school  to  be 
departmental,  thus  making  provision  for  individual  differ- 
ences and  for  specialization  by  teachers.  The  ordinary 
country-school  teacher  is  so  overburdened  with  a  great 
number  of  subjects  to  teach  that  she  can  become  highly 
efficient  in  none.  Yet  the  rural  teacher,  because  of  insuffi- 
cient normal-school  and  other  preparation,  needs  such  op- 
portunity most. 

The  entire  curriculum  could  be  organized  into  four  cycles 
of  three  grades,  or  years,  each:  primary,  upper,  junior  high, 
and  senior  high.  Probably  all  but  the  first  three  grades 
should  be  placed  on  the  departmental  plan,  by  which,  as 
suggested,  each  teacher  teaches  one  or  more  subjects  to 


THE  CURRICULUM  OF  THE  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL      303 

several  classes  instead  of  all  subjects  to  one  class.  Further 
investigation  of  individual  differences  may  even  lead  to  the 
desirability  of  providing  departmental  work  for  all  grades. 
The  first  six  grades  would  be  the  elementary  school  and  the 
last  (five  or)  six  the  high  school.  Perhaps  a  year  in  the 
child's  school  life  can  be  saved  by  such  improved  organization. 

The  accompanying  programme  of  studies  is  for  the  upper 
five  or  six  grades,  and  is  merely  suggestive  of  a  very  general 
plan.  In  the  consolidated  school  several  of  the  alternative 
courses,  such  as  the  industrial  and  college-entrance  courses, 
will  ordinarily  be  omitted,  and  greater  differentiation  may 
be  made  in  the  agricultural  courses.  In  small  schools  with 
few  teachers  little  more  than  the  common,  "core''  curric- 
ulum should  be  attempted.^  The  vocational  work  for  boys 
in  the  common  course  would  be  agricultural  training  in 
an  agricultural  region.  In  a  cattle  country  it  would  be 
more  of  the  nature  of  animal  husbandry.  No  languages 
except  English,  and  no  mathematics  except  arithmetic  (the 
non-English  languages  and  the  non-arithmetical  mathe- 
matics), would  be  studied  by  pupils  unless  a  group  large 
enough  for  a  class,  say  seven  to  ten  pupils,  required  them, 
either  for  daily  use  or  for  entrance  to  a  higher  school,  and 
then  only  when  the  school  had  the  teaching  force  to  do  so, 
and  these  subjects  were  certainly  preferable  to  any  that 
could  be  put  into  their  places.  The  economics  taught 
would,  of  course,  be  rural  economics.  The  commercial  and 
the  normal  courses  should  be  given  in  but  few  schools,  the 
latter  preferably  in  but  one  high  school  in  a  county.  Excel- 
lent developments  of  this  teachers'- training  course  have 
been  made,  as  suggested,  in  several  States,  such  as  Minnesota. 

The  chief  limitations  of  the  present  consolidated  rural- 
school  curriculums  at  present  are  that  they  too  often  are 
merely  college-entrance  courses,  and  are  thus  suited  to  but 
very  few  pupils,  or  none,  and  that  they  have  little  conscious 
adaptation  to  the  principal  problems  of  rural  life.     Universi- 

1  See  page  314. 


304 


THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 


A  SIX-YEAR  PROGRAMME  OF  STUDIES 
(upper  six  grades  of  twelve- year  school) 


Seven  40-minute  periods  daily 

I 

II 

III 

IV 

V 

VI 

Assembly — 20  minutes  daily,  or  study 

S 

S 

5 

5 

5 

5 

Study  period  for  all  pupils  daily 

5 

5 

5 

5 

5 

5 

Hygiene  and  physical  education 

3 

3 

3 

3 

3 

3 

Agricultural  and  home  education 

5 

S 

S 

5 

5 

5 

Arithmetic  and  farm  accounts 

5 

S 

Community  civics  and  current  events 

3 

3 

S 

Advanced  civics  and  rural  economics 

5 

United  States  history 

3 

3 

General  history 

5 

S 

English:     Literature,    composition,    public 
SDeakiner                        

5 

S 

S 

5 

S 

5 

Music,  drawing,  esthetic  appreciation 

2 

2 

2 

2 

2 

2 

Rural  sociology  and  applied  ethics 

S 

General  science 

5 

Physics  and  chemistry 

5 

S 

Geograohv 

4 

4 

Total  required  periods,  excluding  study. . . . 
Number  of  elective  j)eriods 

30 
0 

30 
0 

25 

5 

25 
5 

25 

5 

25 

5 

ties  and  colleges,  especially  agricultural  colleges,  must  come 
soon  to  an  understanding  that  their  entrance  requirements 
of  non-English  languages  and  non-arithmetical  mathematics 
defeat  the  very  purposes  for  which  they  stand,  the  enlight- 
enment, training,  and  inspiration  of  rural  life,  and  that  they 


THE  CURRICULUM  OF  THE  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL      305^ 

must  help  rather  than  hinder  the  close  adaptation  of  high 
schools  to  their  tasks.  Engineering  schools  within  colleges 
may,  of  course,  require  mathematics  and  classical  schools  the 
languages;  but  it  would  be  far  better  for  most  States  to 
have  these  taught  in  colleges  than  in  the  typically  small 
high  schools  where  the  teaching  staffs  are  but  large  enough 
to  teach  the  vital  essentials  for  rural  social  efficiency.  Pro- 
fessors of  education  in  colleges  and  principals  of  high  schools 
must  band  together  to  lead  and  to  force,  if  necessary,  the 
colleges  to  make  the  four-year  high-school  curriculum,  what- 
ever it  may  best  be,  sufficient  (with  good  scholarship  and  a 
principaFs  recommendation)  to  satisfy  the  entrance  require- 
ments. The  lamentable  inefficiency  of  the  present  rural 
elementary  and  high  school,  consolidated  or  not,  is,  in  these 
times,  so  dangerous  to  democracy  and  intolerable  as  to  re- 
quire forceful  measures.  The  highly  specialized  profes- 
sional or  academic  subjects  must  not  be  imposed  on  our 
prospective  farmers. 

We  present  herewith  two  suggestive  programmes  of 
study.  The  short,  single-course  one  above  attempts  to  pro- 
vide the  upper  six  grades  of  a  twelve-year  consoUdated 
school  with  a  rural  education  along  the  line  of  the  five  aims 
of  education.  It  is  arranged  for  a  small  school  with  few 
teachers,  the  minimum  number  possible.  We  do  not  suggest 
the  elective  subjects.  Few  can  be  given.  If  we  assume  that 
teachers  should  not  be  required  to  teach  more  than  twenty- 
five  class  periods  a  week,  with  possibly  five  more  periods  for 
library  or  study-hall  supervision,  we  have  a  need  here  at 
once  for  about  six  or  seven  teachers,  including  the  principal, 
who  would  be  responsible  for  class- teaching  not  more  than 
two-thirds  of  the  time,  say  not  more  than  twenty  hours 
a  week,  preferably  fifteen.  Of  course,  two  of  the  teachers 
will  take  the  place  of  seventh  and  eighth  grade  teachers. 
When  fewer  teachers  are  provided  it  will  be  desirable  to 
omit  one  or  more  of  the  last  years  of  the  course,  and  not 
attempt  to  teach  them.     By  carrying  probably  too  heavy 


3o6  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

a  load  one  teacher  for  each  year  can  handle  the  work,  but 
this  is  not  recommended. 

The  class  periods  are  shorter  than  desirable  for  a  con- 
solidated or  any  other  secondary  school,  perhaps.  There 
should  be  little  home  study  required  for  pupils,  a  number  of 
whom  are  long  on  the  road  each  day,  some  upward  of  an 
hour  each  way  in  many  places.  The  longer  class  period  up 
to  an  hour  gives  opportunity  for  supervised  study,  say  the 
first  half  of  the  period  for  recitation  and  the  second  half 
for  study,  or  other  methods  as  suggested  in  Hallquest's  and 
other  books  on  the  subject.  Fifty  or  fifty-five  minute  periods 
are  desirable.  A  good  plan  has  been  found  to  have  fifty- 
minute  periods  and  have  pupils  change  on  the  hour  with 
the  intervening  ten  minutes  for  social  intercourse,  relaxa- 
tion, conferences  with  teachers,  an  out-of-door  walk  or  run, 
etc.  However,  when  elementary  and  secondary  school  are 
in  the  same  building,  as  usual  in  this  type  of  school,  these 
free  periods  may  disturb  the  elementary  school  and  the 
elementary-school  recesses  may  disturb  the  secondary 
school.  If  so,  elementary  and  secondary  school  pupils  may 
have  recesses  at  the  same  time,  and  little  time  may  be  per- 
mitted for  passing  from  room  to  room  between  periods.  It 
is  difficult  to  arrange  a  daily  programme  that  will  coincide 
well  with  such  arrangement,  but  it  is  being  done.  The  one- 
story  building  is  a  help  here.  Elementary  pupils  may 
play  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  building  from  the  high- 
school  wing,  and  each  classroom  opens  to  both  the  corridor 
and  playground.  There  is  quite  a  movement  on  foot  to 
lengthen  the  school-day  where  considerable  motor  activi- 
ties such  as  manual  training,  physical  education,  laboratory 
work,  etc.,  are  furnished.  Some  consolidated  schools  start 
work  at  8.30  and  close  at  4.  Little  children  are  let  out  to 
play  or  go  home,  if  they  live  near,  at  3.30. 

Assembly  is  provided  for  each  day.  The  time  should 
be  thirty  minutes,  but  we  have  suggested  twenty  here.  For 
programme  convenience  it  may  be  well  in  some  cases  to 


THE   CURRICULUM  OF  THE   CONSOLn)ATED   SCHOOL     307 

have  it  the  first  thing  in  the  afternoon,  when  it  is  harder  to 
do  class  work.  A  study  period  for  all  pupils  daily  is  pro- 
vided. If  necessary,  some  of  the  assembly  periods  may 
each  week  be  devoted  to  study,  but  such  a  procedure  would 
indicate  that  the  principal  and  teachers  do  not  know  how, 
or  lack  skill,  to  make  the  assembly  one  of  the  most  educative 
meetings  of  the  pupils  in  the  day.  Here  all  get  together, 
and  the  possibilities  for  social  training,  singing,  orchestra 
music,  public  speaking,  debates,  speaking  by  outsiders, 
ethical  readings,  current  events,  community  problems,  Httle 
plays,  and  general  social  intercourse  and  friendhness  in  a 
joyous,  co-operative  manner  are  educationally  very  great. 
With  an  able  singing  leader  and  good  community  songs  as  are 
published  in  such  song-books  as  are  published  by  Birchards 
of  Boston  ("Fifty-five  Community  Songs'')?  3-  school  of 
pupils  may  be  lifted  up  and  unified  spiritually  by  music 
alone.  What  they  have  done  for  foreign  groups  and  for 
our  soldiers  is  well  known.  A  large  assembly-room  is  de- 
sirable, and  the  least  that  can  be  done  is  to  provide  a  com- 
bination assembly,  study-hall,  and  gymnasium.  Throwing 
two  classrooms  together  by  a  movable  partition  will  hardly 
solve  the  problem,  although  this  may  be  done  for  the  ele- 
mentary school  for  separate  assemblies  at  times. 

Hygiene  is  an  important  subject  that  lies  at  the  basis 
of  a  needed  health  revolution  in  the  country.  It  may  well 
be  studied  each  week,  and  closely  related  to  life  for  enough 
years  to  give  a  thorough  grounding  in  its  principles  and 
ideals,  and  especially  in  the  habits  necessary  to  health. 
One  hour  a  week  for  this  and  two  for  play,  physical  training, 
and  athletics  are  satisfactory  if  no  more  time  can  be  ob- 
tained. Of  course  a  good  gymnasium  is  desirable,  but  the 
out-of-doors  furnishes  a  good  place,  too,  much  of  the  year. 
If  possible,  obtain  the  gymnasium  and  develop  our  young 
people  better  than  previous  generations.  In  Utah,  the 
swimming-pool  has  been  proved  indispensable.  When  nearly 
half  of  our  recruits  must  be  rejected  for  preventable  physical 


3o8  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

defects  and  ailments  in  country  and  city,  the  schools  should 
wake  up  to  their  national  responsibilities.  Personal  hygiene, 
rural  hygiene,  rural  sanitation,  public  hygiene,  and  voca- 
tional hygiene  as  relating  to  country  conditions  should  be 
studied  and  practised.  Coleman's  "The  People's  Health," 
the  O'Shea-Kellogg  series,  the  Gulick  series,  the  Ritchie 
series,  Tolman's  "Hygiene  for  the  Worker,"  and  Richards' 
" Hygiene  for  Girls "  are  of  the  new  order.  Ditman's  "Home 
Hygiene  and  Prevention  of  Disease"  is  probably  the  best 
book  for  the  home,  and  should  be  at  hand  always  for  refer- 
ence. Hygiene  is  rapidly  being  socialized.  The  physical- 
training  manuals,  in  three  volumes,  of  the  State  of  New 
Jersey  are  probably  the  best  published  for  all  grades  as  yet. 
The  latest  books  on  rural  sanitation  should  be  on  reference. 
Texts  in  hygiene  are  yet  to  be  prepared  for  rural  schools.^ 

Agricultural  and  home  education  has  as  much  time  in 
this  common  curriculum  as  has  EngHsh,  and  it  certainly 
deserves  it.  Vocational  education  for  home  and  field  is  a 
minimal  essential  to  take  no  second  place.  For  boys,  farm 
manual  training  and  carpentry  and  concrete  work,  home 
projects,  fruit-raising,  care  of  farm  animals,  and  the  various 
phases  of  agricultural  instruction  that  can  be  separated  and 
taught  to  boys  alone  may  be  given.  For  girls,  sewing,  cook- 
ing, laundry-work,  home  decoration,  the  care  of  children, 
home  literature,  home  projects,  poultry-raising  and  care  of 
the  dairy,  and  so  on,  may  be  provided.  For  boys  and  girls 
in  common  classes  the  subjects  of  botany  and  elementary 
agriculture,  household  accounting,  and  others,  may  be  pro- 
vided. If  the  botany  and  agriculture  take  two  years  of 
about  five  hours  a  week,  and  the  separate  subjects  three  or 
four  years,  the  pupils  should  get  rather  definite  training  for 
the  vocations  of  farming.  Perhaps  rural  economics  and  rural 
sociology  may  be  put  in  here  for  one  year  instead  of  sepa- 
rately, according  to  our  plan.  Of  course  five  periods  a  week 
is  only  a  suggestion.     Double  periods  or  half  days  may  be 

* "  Health  Education  in  Rural  Schools  "  is  recommended  for  teachers. 


A  domestic  arts  exhibit 


A  day  of  recreation  in  the  mountains 


THE   CURRICULUM   OF   THE   CONSOLn)ATED   SCHOOL      309 

arranged.  Short  courses  for  those  who  have  left  school  are 
being  provided  in  many  consolidated  schools. 

Arithmetic,  farm  accounts,  and  bookkeeping,  and  all 
the  applications  of  arithmetic  needed  for  good  farming  and 
home-keeping,  should  be  given.  Much  of  the  ordinary 
arithmetic  can  be  cut  out  and  rural  arithmetics  used,  of 
which  there  are  several.  The  work  of  the  national  com- 
mittees in  selecting  the  essentials  of  arithmetic  should  be 
studied  in  making  the  course.  Much  of  the  work  will  be 
devised  by  the  teacher  in  connection  with  practical  activities. 

Good  penmanship,  or  handwriting,  up  to  a  reasonable 
standard  of  efficiency  in  speed  and  quality  of  writing  is 
desirable.  By  use  of  the  Ayres,  Thorndike,  or  other  scales 
of  quality,  and  the  most  desirable  standards  of  speed,  those 
pupils  may  be  selected  who  need  regular  drill.  Fifteen 
minutes  a  day  may  be  taken  from  some  other  subject  for 
those  pupils  who  need  drill.  Other  pupils  of  a  class  may 
advance  beyond  the  minimum  standards  set  for  ordinary 
correspondence,  or  study  something  else  in  the  time. 
Spelling,  writing,  and  English  should  be  considered,  cor- 
rected, and  marked  in  all  courses  and  subjects.  A  few 
minutes  a  day  may  be  taken  for  spelling  drills  from  EngKsh 
or  other  studies.  All  pupils  before  entering  the  upper  six 
grades  should  be  a  hundred  per  cent  correct  on  most  of  the 
thousand  words  given  in  Ayres'  spelHng  scale,  or  the  larger 
number  in  the  Pryor  list. 

Rural-community  civics  is  of  prime  importance  in  democ- 
racy's schools  and  has  in  the  past  been  criminally  neglected. 
Field  and  Nearing  have  a  delightful  little  book  on  the  sub- 
ject for  rural  schools,  which,  with  current  events  and  library 
and  magazine  readings,  will  furnish  work  for  the  first  and 
second  (seventh  and  eighth)  grades.  It  really  could  be 
handled  in  the  sixth  grade  of  the  elementary  school,  and  thus 
catch  many  pupils  who  drop  out  early.  Dunn's  *'The  Com- 
munity and  the  Citizen,"  Towne's  *' Social  Problems,"  the 
community-civics  lessons  in  pamphlet  form  published  by 


3IO  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

the  Bureau  of  Education,  and  other  volumes  rapidly  ap- 
pearing may  be  desirable.  The  third  year  should  be  a  solid 
grounding  in  the  subject,  but  leaving  state  and  national 
civics  and  government  largely  to  a  later  time.  Beard's 
"American  Citizenship"  and  such  books  fit  the  latter 
course,  which  here  is  put  into  the  last  year  with  rural 
economics.  Carver's  "Rural  Economics"  and  separate 
volume  of  "Readings  in  Rural  Economics"  is  somewhat 
heavy,  perhaps,  for  a  class  not  prepared  by  social  studies, 
as  this  will  be.  Burch  and  Nearing  have  a  good  elementary 
book  on  "Elementary  Economics,"  but  not  especially 
adapted  to  rural  schools.  If  the  teacher  and  principal  are 
graduates  of  an  agricultural  school  they  will  know  of  good 
volumes  on  the  subject  for  their  own  personal  use. 

United  States  history  has  now  good  texts  like  Muzzey's 
and  James  and  Sanford's,  and  there  are  good  books  on  the 
teaching  of  history  (as  well  as  most  other  subjects),  such  as 
Johnson's.  Three  times  a  week  for  two  years  are  sufficient 
to  cover  the  subject  fairly  well.  Some  put  the  course  in 
again  in  the  last  year,  as  I  have  done  in  the  second  and 
larger  general  programme  presented  later. 

General  history  with  its  broad  social  studies,  when  well 
taught,  gives  an  international  breadth  to  the  pupil's  experi- 
ence. In  the  new  internationalism  of  our  country  two  years 
could  be  said  to  be  desirable,  five  hours  a  week.  Of  course 
this  will  include  another  survey  of  United  States  history  as 
a  part  of  the  general.  Good  history  teachers  are  very  hard 
to  get,  and  too  many  let  the  subject  (and  the  pupil's  interest) 
die  on  their  hands.  Yet  they  have  a  wonderful  opportunity. 
History  should  be  used  as  a  means  of  explaining  and  sim- 
plifying modern  complex  social  life.  The  growth  of  rural 
life,  inventions,  and  institutions  will  be  emphasized. 

English  is  discussed  later  in  a  separate  chapter,  as  are 
also  the  non-Enghsh  languages.  The  non-arithmetical 
mathematics  (algebra  and  geometry)  are  also  discussed 
briefly.     Our  programme  permits  of  some  elective  periods. 


THE  CURRICULUM  OF  THE  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL      3 II 

and  more  may  be  provided  for  a  group  going  to  a  college 
that  still  demands  these  subjects.  Well-taught  and  selected 
English  literature  and  composition,  with  all  it  may  include, 
is  a  minimal-essential  subject.  The  non-English  languages 
and  non-arithmetical  mathematics  are  not,  I  believe,  al- 
though some  feel  that  they  may  possibly  be  worth  what 
they  cost,  if  not  what  they  exclude.  Public  speaking  and 
the  use  of  magazines,  the  methods  of  organizing  community 
literary,  reading,  and  improvement  clubs,  letter-writing 
which  is  the  minimal  essential  of  written  composition,  and 
so  on,  may  be  thoroughly  treated.  Letter-writing  may  be 
made  to  include  all  forms  of  composition  and  can  hardly 
be  overemphasized.  Some  professors  in  agricultural  col- 
leges have  recently  put  excellent  stories  and  essays  on  coun- 
try life  in  volumes  for  classes  in  English  in  country  higher 
schools. 

Avocational  efficiency  demands  many  types  of  activities, 
such  as  music  and  recreation.  The  various  fine  arts  can  be 
treated  in  close  connection  with  country  problems,  and  per- 
haps not  only  art  and  nature  appreciation  may  be  developed 
but  regular  classes  in  drawing  and  painting,  or  other  types 
of  artistic  expression,  may  be  provided.  Music  should  be 
given  to  nearly  all  pupils  one  or  two  periods  a  week  through- 
out the  course  for  technical  knowledge  and  skill  and  for 
the  appreciation  and  dehghts  afforded.  The  old-fashioned 
singing-schools  are  being  revived  as  community  singing. 

Moral  efficiency,  with  the  general  breakdown  of  the 
rural  church  (at  least  a  common  church  which  all  attend), 
demands  special  attention.  The  subject  has  been  given 
great  attention  in  recent  years.  Much  can  be  done  through 
the  previous  courses,  and  some  would  omit  moral  efficiency 
as  a  separate  aim,  but  a  separate  course  for  a  half  year, 
gradually  merging  into  rural  sociology,  is  undoubtedly  de- 
sirable. Sharp  of  Wisconsin,  Fairchild,  and  others  have 
recently  been  elevating  this  study.  Sharp's  book  is  pub- 
lished by  the  Bobbs-Merrill  firm  at  Indianapolis.     Mrs. 


312  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

Cabot^s  books  on  ''Everyday  Ethics"  (Holt)  and  other 
similar  subjects  are  valuable  texts. 

General  science  has  a  great  message  and  service  to  ren- 
der modern  life,  and  especially  the  country.  A  renaissance 
of  science  teaching  has  taken  place  and  the  subject  is  being 
hooked  to  the  practical  problems  of  life  along  the  great  lines 
of  health,  vocation,  avocation,  etc.  Elhuff  has  a  valuable 
text  and  manual  (Heath),  but  I  know  of  no  book  especially 
for  rural  schools.  General  physics  and  chemistry  are  each 
given  five  hours  a  week  for  a  year  later.  They  also  must  be 
profoundly  influenced  by  farm  needs  and  the  great  aims  of 
education.  The  teacher  should  have  good  laboratories 
and  a  demonstration  room  with  raised  seats  for  the  pupils. 
I  hesitate  to  name  a  text  even  as  an  example,  since  change 
is  taking  place  so  rapidly.  Botany  we  may  put  in  with  the 
vocational  subjects,  if  six  years  are  too  much  for  the  more 
purely  vocational  subjects.  It  should  have  at  least  one 
year,  and  of  course  be  especially  full  of  help  and  suggestion 
for  people  living  by  and  among  a  world  of  plants.  The  avo- 
cational  value  of  the  sciences  is  also  very  great.  One  may 
study  the  stars,  not  to  know  when  to  plant  his  corn  or  kill 
his  hogs,  according  to  old  superstitions,  but  to  increase  his 
enjoyment  and  harmless  happiness  through  life.  The  mys- 
teries of  nature  are  instinctively  matters  of  great  interest. 
The  elements  of  zoology  may  be  connected  with  the  one 
hour  a  week  devoted  to  hygiene  and  its  basis  of  physiology 
and  anatomy.  Perhaps  a  good  half-year  course  or  longer, 
five  hours  a  week,  may  be  found  for  it  elsewhere.  It  may 
be  that  a  half  year  of  botany  and  a  half  year  of  zoology  may 
well  be  provided.  The  elementary  course  should  be  full  of 
nature  study  and  thus  prepare  for  these  high-school  studies. 
These  sciences  may  well  be  classified  about  life  problems. 

Geography  may  minister  much  to  man's  understanding 
of  his  scene  of  action  and  the  great  natural  and  social  forces 
at  work  in  the  world.  Physical,  commercial,  and  political 
geography  from  the  standpoint  of  the  mjodern  rural  worker 


THE  CURRICULUM  OF  THE  CONSOLn)ATED   SCHOOL     313 

and  citizen,  who  has  world-wide  relations  along  many  lines 
especially  economic,  are  all  desirable,  not  as  technical,  highly 
classified  sciences,  but  as  selections  of  matter  of  most  worth 
to  country  people,  and  organized  on  the  basis  of  interest,  the 
psychology  of  learning,  and  of  human  need.  Dodge  and 
Kirchway  have  a  good  book  on  the  teaching  of  the  sub- 
ject. Twiss  has  a  very  good  volume  on  "Teaching  the 
Natural  Sciences''  (Macmillan).  The  writer's  volume  on 
"Teaching  Elementary  School  Subjects"  gives  rather  com- 
plete bibliographies  on  the  elementary-school  subjects  dis- 
cussed above.  Inglis'  volume  on  "Principles  of  Secondary 
Education"  (Macmillan)  and  Johnston's  volumes  on  "High- 
School  Education"  and  the  "Modern  High  School"  (Scrib- 
ners)  treat  well  of  the  high  school. 

The  second  programme  of  studies  offered  herewith  is 
much  more  ambitious,  and  requires  a  larger  staff  such  as 
could  probably  be  provided  in  a  large  village  or  small  city 
with  consolidation.  It  was  developed  originally  as  a  gen- 
erally suggestive  programme  of  studies  for  all  secondary 
schools,  and  as  here  modified  it  perhaps  would  fit  no  local 
situation.  A  longer  day  is  here  suggested,  but  the  periods 
may  remain  the  same  as  in  the  previous  one.  An  eight- 
period  day  is,  I  believe,  a  mistake,  and  one  of  six  periods 
would  probably  be  highly  desirable  if  each  were  longer. 
To  avoid  so  many  studies  a  week  for  each  pupil  the  future 
will  undoubtedly  provide  extensive  correlations.  The  social 
sciences  might  be  organized  as  one  continuous  subject,  for 
example,  and  the  natural  sciences  and  the  vocational  sub- 
jects will  probably  be  given  in  less  disjointed  form  than 
usually.  Of  course  most  good  consolidated  and  rural- 
village  schools,  as  previously  suggested,  will  give  a  good  deal 
of  extension  and  demonstration  work,  and  will  provide  short 
courses  in  the  winter  for  those  who  can  attend  the  entire 
school  year.  The  large  programme  gives,  also,  alternative 
curriculums  differentiated  for  seven  different  groups.     The 


314 


THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 


A  FIVE  OR  SIX  YEAR  HIGH-SCHOOL  PROGRAMME  OF 
STUDIES! 

THE  SIXTH  YEAR  HAS  INTENTIONALLY  BEEN  LEFT  VACANT 


Probably  Seven  40  to  50  Minute  Periods  DaUy 

I 
(7) 

II 

(8) 

Ill 

(I) 

IV 

(2) 

V 

(3) 

VI 

(4) 

Assembly — 30  minutes  dailv 

S 
5 

5 
S 

S 

s 

S 

s 

Study  period  for  all 

pupils  daily 

Required  oe 
Most  Pupils 

"  Core  Curricu- 
lum "  or  "  Com- 
mon Curriculum" 

English — comp.  lit.,  pub.  speaking 

Hygiene— personal,  public,  vocational. . 

Physical  education  and  recreation 

Music,  fine  art  (drawing),  appreciation. . 
Vocational,  ed'n,  incl.  household  arts. . . . 

Arithmetic  and  farm  accounting 

Geography  and  elementary  science 

History,  U.  S 

S 
I 
2 
2 
4 
S 
4 
4 
3 

5 

s 

I 
2 
2 

s 

s 
s 
s 

s 

I 

2 
2 

s 
s 

5 
2 

2 
2 

Community  civics,  survey  of  vocations. 
General  science 

Applied  ethics  and  el.  sociology 

General  history,  or  to  1700.  .  . 

Another  science,  or  more  general  science 
United  States  history  or  general  history . 
Gov.  civics  and  el.  economics 

Total  required  periods,  excl.  of  study. 

30 

30 

30 

20 

0 

0 

0 

10 

I.  General 
Course 

Probably  largely  optional,  with  educat 
Ten  hours  in  fourtn  and  fifteen  hours  in 

ional 
fifth} 

guid 
.rears. 

ance. 

10 

5 
5 

2.  Agricultural 
Course 

Farm  arithmetic  and  accounts 

Rural  economics 

3.  Home-Economics 
CoimsE 

Sewing 

5 
S 

S 

s 

S 

s 

5 

s 

Cooking 

Household  accounts  and  laundry         . . 

Home  management,  bacteriology,  literat 

ure. . 

4.  C0MMERCLA.L 
Course 

Business  arithmetic  and  business  Englisb 

.... 

Stenography 

Typewriting . .           .    

5.  Normal  CoxTRSE 

Elementary  educational  i)sychology 

Class  management  and  school  subjects . . 
Observation  and  practice 

Elective 

6.  Industrial 
Course 

Business  arithmetic  and  accounts 

5 
5 

S 

5 

7.  College- 
Entrance 
Course 

A  foreign  language:  Sp)anish,  French,  etc 

Algebra 

Geometry 

Elective 

» Revised  from  one  published  in  School  and  Society  for  May  12, 19 17. 


THE   CURRICULUM  OF  THE   CONSOLn)ATED   SCHOOL      315 

industrial  group  may,  in  most  rural  regions,  be  omitted, 
although  farm  blacksmithing  and  other  such  work  may  be 
provided  in  the  vocational  course  and  be  termed  shop  work. 
We  cannot  take  space  to  discuss  the  second  programme, 
nor  can  we  suggest  desirable  programmes  of  recitations  for 
different  numbers  of  teachers  for  either  programme  of  studies. 
We  only  hope  that  some  valuable  suggestions  may  arise 
from  perusal  of  the  different  chapters.  A  college-entrance 
course  is  provided,  but  this  does  not  mean  that  the  former 
course  prevents  preparation  for  the  conservative  college 
that  still  requires  languages  and  mathematics  for  entrance. 
The  pamphlet  on  "Cardinal  Principles  of  Secondary  Edu- 
cation ''  by  the  National  Committee  on  the  Reorganization 
of  Secondary  Education,  published  by  the  Government 
Printing  Office,  should  be  read  in  this  connection.  My  aim 
here  is  to  lead  to  experimentation  and  original  study,  not 
to  settle  this  most  important  question  in  any  particular. 

After  securing  able  teachers  the  most  important  problem 
of  rural  education  is  the  programme  of  studies.  Yet  the  help 
one  can  secure  on  making  such  a  programme  from  responsible 
educational  bodies  is  almost  insignificant.  The  writer  at- 
tempts to  plough  but  a  few  outlining  furrows  in  this  '^stumpy" 
ground.  A  crop  of  experimentation  and  vigorous  adaptation 
of  the  school  to  the  farm  is  all  that  may  be  expected. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  What  principles  of  curriculum-making  may  desirably  be  added 

to  the  list  given  in  this  chapter? 

2.  What  practical  suggestions  on  curricula  for  the  upper  grades  and 

high  school  are  given  by  Doctor  Inglis  in  his  volume  "Principles 
of  Secondary  Education,"  chap.  XX? 

3.  Read  chap.  VIII  of  Arp's  "Rural  Education  and  the  Consolidated 

School,"  entitled  The  Rural  Community  and  Its  Needs,  and 
then  read  his  chaps.  VI  and  VII,  deaHng  with  curricula,  and  de- 
termine whether  these  needs  would  be  met  by  the  types  of  cur- 
ricula he  recommends. 


3l6  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

4.  What  suggestions  for  rural  high-school  curriculum-making  can 

you  find  in  Lane's  bulletin  on  "Agricultural  Instruction  in  the 
High  Schools  of  Six  Eastern  States"?  Government  Printing 
Office. 

5.  What  further  suggestions  do  you  obtain  from  Nolan's  volume  on 

"The  Teaching  of  Agriculture,"  chaps.  Ill  and  IV?  Houghton 
Mifflin  Co. 

6.  When  do  people  need  to  know  how  to  spell  words?    If  we  pre- 

pared pupils  to  spell  the  words  most  frequently  used  and  mis- 
spelled in  letter-writing,  what  eliminations  could  be  made  from 
the  ordinary  spelling  courses  ?  See  chaps.  I  and  III  of  Rapeer's 
"Teaching  Elementary  School  Subjects"  (Scribner). 

7.  If  the  aims  of  education  are  vital,  vocational,  avocational,  civic, 

and  moral  efficiency,  what  types  of  knowledge,  habits,  and  ideals 
are  of  most  worth  to  country  boys  and  girls?  Put  them  in  a 
large  chart.  A  group  of  teachers  may  well  work  on  but  one 
square  of  the  chart  such  as  the  health  or  the  civic  ideals  or 
habits  desirable  in  a  particular  community. 

8.  What  subjects  have  been  emphasized  as  of  little  and  of  great 

comparative  value  by  the  war? 

9.  What  per  cent  of  time  have  the  rural  public  schools,  elementary 

and  high,  given  to  instruction  and  training  along  health  lines? 
See  report  of  investigation  in  School  and  Society  magazine  for 
December  18,  1918.  See  also  Bobbitt's  "The  Curriculum." 
10.  What  per  cent  of  school  time  from  the  sixth  grade  on  may  legit- 
imately be  devoted  to  direct  vocational  education  (agricultural 
and  domestic),  partly  on  the  farm  and  partly  in  school?  Does 
this  exclude  or  minimize  real  cultural  and  avocational  prepara- 
tion? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Note. — So  little  of  value  has  been  written  on  the  curriculum  for  the 
consolidated  school,  apart  from  the  references  in  the  chapter,  that  no  special 
list  is  here  given. 


CHAPTER   XV 

RURAL-LIFE  NEEDS   AND    COLLEGE-ENTRANCE 
DEMANDS 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  per  cent  of  the  graduates  of  some  well-estabHshed  consoH- 

dated  school  of  which  you  have  knowledge  go  to  college? 

2.  To  what  colleges  in  the  same  State  do  they  go? 

3.  What  subjects  are  required  for  entrance  by  these  colleges? 

4.  What  subjects  do  these  requirements  indirectly  force  high  schools 

to  teach  ? 

5.  What  is  the  average,  or  median,  number  of  teachers  in  the  rural 

high  schools  of  your  State? 

6.  If  the  college-entrance  requirements  name  subjects  that  are  not 

of  most  worth  to  rural  youth,  how  can  the  typical  high  school 
with  very  few  teachers  provide  both  college-entrance  curriculums 
for  the  few  and  rural-life  curriculums  for  all? 

7.  What  steps  have  been  taken  by  colleges  in  your  State  to  make  it 

easy  for  pupils  to  make  thorough  preparation  for  meeting  the 
most  pressing  problems  of  life,  and  at  the  same  time  to  enter 
college  if  they  are  able  to  do  so  on  graduation? 

8.  What  effect  have  the  requirements  of  colleges  without  your  State 

on  your  rural  high-school  programme  of  studies? 

9.  Is  a  rural  consoHdated  school  justified  in  attempting  to  meet 

the  non-English-language  and  non-arithmetical-mathematics  re- 
quirements of  conservative  Eastern  colleges,  considering  the 
percentage  of  high-school  graduates  who  go  to  them? 
10.  What  has  Professor  Bobbitt  to  say  on  the  non-English  language 
question  in  his  volume  on  "The  Curriculum"?  Houghton 
Mifflin  Co. 

I.    The  Essentials  and  the  Requirements 

A  crucial  problem  in  American  education  to-day  is  that 
of  adjusting  the  conflict  between  giving  our  pupils  a  real 
education  and  of  preparing  some  of  them  for  college.  In  the 
rural  consolidated  school  this  problem  everywhere  is  acute 

317 


3l8  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

because  this  type  of  school  must  not  fail  to  give  boys  and 
girls  a  thoroughly  efficient  rural  schooling.  In  the  history 
of  education  new  schools  have  failed  the  people  by  becoming 
formal  and  aristocratic,  catering  to  a  few  instead  of  the 
many.  The  gymnasium,  the  real  school,  the  academy,  and 
the  ordinary  high  school  have  each  started  as  a  popular 
reform  school,  and  gradually  lost  their  early  high  aim.  The 
educator  who  has  studied  the  psychological,  historical,  and 
social  aspects  of  the  curriculum  sees  that  a  natural,  tradi- 
tional association  has  to-day  grown  up  in  the  minds  of 
many  between  the  idea  of  secondary  schooling  and  a  curric- 
ulum made  up  of  such  subjects  as  Latin,  Greek,  algebra, 
geometry,  French,  German,  etc.  Many  think  of  the  sec- 
ondary school  as  being  the  institution  which  teaches  these 
subjects,  and  that  a  six,  five,  or  four  year  secondary  school 
would  lose  its  identity  if  it  taught  others  instead. 

The  educator  looks  upon  schooling,  however,  not  as  a 
traditional,  static,  fixed  thing,  so  far  as  subjects  of  study 
go,  but  as  a  vital  agency  for  helping  the  people  to  meet  in 
the  most  effective  manner  their  principal  problems  of  life. 
He  is  interested  in  the  dominant  unmet  needs  of  our  civiliza- 
tion, in  the  social  composition  of  the  student  population, 
and  in  the  types  of  knowledge,  habits,  ideals,  and  apprecia- 
tions which  will  best  contribute  to  the  solution  of  grave 
individual  and  social  problems.  Latin,  geometry,  algebra, 
German,  and  other  subjects  are  to  him  but  tools  to  be  used 
only  when  they  fit  the  purpose  of  education  better  than 
any  others  which  may  possibly  be  selected  or  constructed. 
There  is  to  him  no  sanctified  subject-matter  to  question 
the  relative  value  of  which  is  sacrilege.  All  phases  of  a 
curriculum  are  to  be  submitted  to  the  test  of  relative  con- 
tribution to  the  dominant  purposes  of  schooling  in  our 
present-day  complex  and  rapidly  changing  industrial  democ- 
racy. 

The  social  composition  of  the  high  school  has  within  a 
few  years  vastly  changed.     From  being  an  aristocratic  in- 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND   COLLEGE  DEMANDS  319 

stitution  fitted  for  the  few  who  went  to  college,  the  high 
school  has  in  the  last  fifteen  years  doubled  its  number  of 
pupils,  over  90  per  cent  of  whom  will  never  attend  a  college. 
From  being  an  institution  which  could  not  well  be  tested  by 
its  serviceability  in  meeting  the  pressing  needs  of  life  (since 
the  children  of  well-to-do  parents  have  many  means  of  suc- 
cess aside  from  their  schooling) ,  it  has  become  one  in  which 
such  fallacies  as  those  of  broad  "formal  discipline"  cannot 
be  disguised  by  fine  words  and  phrases,  such  as  "culture," 
"discipline,"  "preparation  for  college,"  and  the  like.  We 
are  to-day  facing  the  problem  of  giving  a  secondary  educa- 
tion to  nearly  2,000,000  children  from  all  ranks  of  society 
instead  of  merely  to  those  of  the  "upper  crust." 

Life  Problems  and  Educational  Problems. — The  prob- 
lems which  most  of  these  pupils  face  when  they  leave  school 
are  the  common  problems  of  life  rather  than  the  artificial 
demands  of  an  academic  college.  These  principal  life 
problems,  about  five  in  number,  form  the  chief  aims  of  edu- 
cation about  which  we  are  practically  all  agreed.  These 
aims  of  public  education,  as  we  have  previously  suggested, 
are  the  following  forms  of  ability  or  efficiency: 

1.  Vital  efficiency — health  and  physical  development. 

2.  Vocational  efficiency — agricultural,  domestic,  and 
others. 

3.  Avocational  efficiency — right  use  of  leisure,  wholesome 
enjoyment,  recreation. 

4.  Civic  efficiency— citizenship. 

5.  Moral  efficiency — morality,  true  religion,  and  social 
service. 

These  are  the  chief  social  aims  of  all  phases  of  educa- 
tion from  the  pre-school  period  upward.  Knowledge,  habits, 
ideals,  and  appreciations  (including  attitudes,  prejudices, 
tastes,  points  of  view,  etc.)  must  be  developed  along  all  of 
these  five  lines  and  also  for  such  fundamental  tools  as  the 
three  R's.  Placing  at  the  left  of  the  page  these  seven  com- 
monly accepted  aims,  and  at  the  top  of  the  page  the  four 


320  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

types  of  psychological  changes  which  can  be  made  in  indi- 
viduals, as  shown  in  the  previous  chapter,  we  may  form  by 
horizontal  and  vertical  lines  a  chart,  in  the  squares  of  which 
we  may  place  the  minimal  essential  of  an  education,  ele- 
mentary, secondary,  higher.  Some  of  the  general  subjects 
and  activities  (greatly  modified,  rearranged,  and  stated) 
which  we  shall  require  in  the  rural  school  corresponding  to 
these  aims,  as  above  given,  are  those  of 

Hygiene  and  physical  education. 

Agricultural  training. 

Rural  economics. 

Arithmetic. 

Home  education. 

American  citizenship. 

History. 

Introductory  social  science. 

Introductory  natural  science. 

Applied  ethics. 

English  language  and  literature. 

Music. 

Drawing. 

Public  speaking. 

Avocational  and  recreational  activities. 

Rural  sociology. 

It  can  be  seen  that  these  subjects  are,  or  can  be,  closely 
related  to  the  five  dominant  classes  of  needs  of  our  people 
as  individuals  and  as  a  nation  and  thus  to  the  five  dominant 
aims  of  schooling.  The  Hst  is  noteworthy  for  two  great 
omissions,  covering  six  to  eight  subjects,  namely,  the  ** non- 
English  languages "  and  the  ''non-arithmetical mathematics.'' 
These  cannot  in  America  be  justly  required  of  any  large 
proportion  of  our  pupils. .  They  are  highly  specialized  sub- 
jects, meeting  the  dominant  and  fundamental  needs  of  ex- 
ceedingly few  persons.  They  cannot  be  listed  with  the 
minimal  essentials  of  a  commonly  required  education.  If 
we  were  a  European  country  in  close  association  with  peo- 


Grading  and  lesting  corn  in  a  school  laboratory,  West  Virginia 


A  class  in  soil  studv  in  Wisconsin 


Reproduced  by  courtesy  of  Division  of  Agricultural  Instruction,  U.  S.  Dept.  of  AgricuUure 
Farm  mechanical  drawing  in  a  Maryland  school 


RURAL  NEEDS   AND   COLLEGE   DEMANDS  32 1 

pies  using  other  languages  than  our  own,  if  all  our  students 
went  into  engineering,  foreign  service,  or  translation,  if  there 
were  not  so  many  mechanical  substitutes  for  calculation  in 
use,  if  we  could  depend  upon  training  regardless  of  subject- 
matter  (formal  discipline),  if  all  students  had  from  ten  to 
fifteen  years  for  secondary  and  higher  education,  if  the 
problems  of  life  were  not  so  insistent  and  pressing  for  our 
people,  if  our  students  were  all  exactly  alike,  and  if  the  added 
cost  for  teaching  such  subjects  to  all  were  not  prohibitive, 
we  might  entertain  the  suggestion  that  these  five  or  more 
subjects  might  well  be  kept  as  the  staples,  or  staple  electives, 
of  secondary  education,  and  be  required  for  entrance  by 
all  colleges,  even  State  agricultural  colleges. 

Traditional  Subject-Matter  vs.  Essentials. — As  it  is 
to-day,  the  omitted  subjects  are  usually  required  for  entrance 
to  colleges,  and  our  great  popular  high  schools,  with  their 
thousands  of  students  to  the  college's  hundreds,  must,  willy- 
nilly,  in  many  cases,  and  because  of  the  force  of  aristocratic 
and  traditional  standards  in  others,  teach  the  non-essential 
instead  of  the  essential,  since  algebra,  geometry,  Latin, 
French,  German,  Greek,  Spanish,  etc.,  are  not  minimal 
essentials  of  an  education.  They  are  the  tools  of  a  very 
limited  group  of  persons,  and  most  who  study  them  to-day 
in  our  rural  or  city  schools  have  much  better  use  for  their 
time. 

Even  where  a  high  school  has  a  large  teaching  force  it 
is  difficult  to  make  up  a  strictly,  and  effective,  educational 
course  for  a  student,  and  at  the  same  time  provide  a  college- 
entrance  course  for  the  few  who  propose  going  to  college. 
But  the  typical  high  school  of  this  country  has  but  two  to 
four  teachers.  It  cannot  give  a  separate  course  for  those 
going  to  college  and  at  the  same  time  take  up  the  courses 
that  are  closely  related  to  the  fundamental  needs  of  our 
students  and  the  country  at  large.  Out  in  the  cactus  and 
sage-brush  regions  of  the  West,  in  the  little  '* God-forsaken" 
Eastern  village  which  so  much  needs  intelligent  study  and 


k 


322  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

citizenship  alive  to  its  needs,  and  scattered  over  the  broad 
agricultural  valleys,  as  well  as  in  the  high  schools  of  our 
cities,  we  find  pupils  droning  over  Caesar's  wars  in  ancient 
Gaul,  covering  blackboards  with  relatively  meaningless 
algebraic  or  geometric  symbols,  and  vainly  endeavoring  to 
gain  a  respectable  knowledge  of  one  or  two  non-English 
languages.  This  is  the  greatest  tragedy  witnessed  by  the 
educator  as  he  visits  the  schools  of  America  to-day.  A  few 
decades  more  and  a  social,  truly  American  education  will 
have  been  provided,  and  these  anomalies  will  not  be  seen. 
To-day  our  problem  is  to  connect  education  with  life.  Let 
the  few  colleges  adjust  themselves  to  the  many  high  schools 
rather  than  the  opposite,  and  proper  sequence  in  studies  will 
be  naturally  arranged. 

Nearly  a  million  preventable  deaths  occur  each  year 
in  our  country,  and  yet  our  secondary  pupils  study  little  or 
no  hygiene;  and  almost  no  time  is  given  to  physical  develop- 
ment. The  pupils  may,  after  several  years'  study,  be  able 
to  translate  the  legend  on  the  medal  presented  to  Colonel 
Gorgas,  "Salus  Populi  Suprema  Lex,"  but  the  preventable 
death,  illness,  and  physical-defects  rates  remain  uninflu- 
enced by  such  study.  No  country  ever  had  a  greater  need 
of  energetic  and  enlightened  citizenship,  and  yet  but  a  small 
proportion  of  our  high-school  students  get  even  the  usual 
desiccated  half-year  course  in  "dry-bone  civics."  Indus- 
trial and  domestic  intelligence  and  skill  the  typical  small 
high  school  leaves  very  largely,  or  entirely,  undeveloped, 
even  though  self-preservation  is  the  first  law  of  life,  and  no 
real  ''culture"  can  omit  such  fundamental  development  as 
that  connected  with  one's  life  calling.  Pupils  do  not  have 
time  for  essentials,  since  the  college  and  tradition  demand 
much  time  on  non-essentials. 

The  serious  recommendation  of  the  educator  to  the  col- 
lege is  that  it  either  demand  the  minimal  essentials  needed 
for  American  life,  or  free  the  high  school  entirely  by  making 
no  conditions  beyond  graduation  from ,  a  four-year  high- 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND  COLLEGE  DEMANDS  323 

school  course  for  entrance.  No  college  can  afford  to  injure 
and  handicap  American  education  in  these  stirring  and  ex- 
acting times.  No  college  will  fail  to  profit  by  helping  the 
high  schools  as  much  as  possible  to  meet  directly  the  domi- 
nant needs  of  American  life  for  real  culture  and  real  efficiency. 

That  evolution  is  all  in  the  direction  outlined  above  we 
have  many  indications.  High  schools  are  in  many  places 
finding  ways  and  means  by  which  to  make  of  themselves 
real  "people's  colleges '*;  the  rapidly  coming  six- six  plan  of 
organization  is  sure  to  help;  colleges  are  modifying  entrance 
requirements  in  the  right  direction,  several  of  the  best  in 
the  country  already  meeting  fairly  well  the  demands  of  this 
chapter;  and  advanced  students  of  education  are  everywhere 
practically  unanimous  in  this  requirement  of  "hands  off.*' 
The  recent  surveys  of  secondary-school  systems  contain 
strong  indorsements  of  this  policy,  such,  for  example,  as 
Larned's  investigation  of  secondary  education  in  Vermont 
for  the  Carnegie  Foundation,  and  Davis's  investigation  of 
the  high  schools  of  New  York  City  for  the  School  Inquiry. 
The  surveys  of  higher  education  by  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of 
Education  suggest  greater  freedom  and  adaptation  to  life 
needs.  The  recent  books  on  secondary  education  are  prac- 
tically unanimous  in  this  direction,  as  is  also  the  report  of 
the  National  Committee  on  the  Reorganization  of  Secondary 
Education.  Yet  all  of  these  will  probably  be  considered 
conservative  in  a  brief  time  because  of  the  present  rapid 
advance. 

In  response  to  a  letter  of  inquiry  a  number  of  leading 
educators  have  expressed  to  the  writer  their  best  judgments 
on  this  general  problem;  and,  as  can  be  seen  by  the  following 
quotations,  the  general  verdict  is  that  the  college  must  help 
education  toward  a  fundamental  reorganization  to  meet 
the  needs  of  life  by  accepting  the  product  of  the  four  to 
six  years'  course  with  little  or  no  qualification  outside  of  the 
five  fundamental  lines  above  mentioned.  If  algebra  and 
geometry  are  a  part  of  the  necessary  technical  preparation 


324  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

for  engineering,  if  Latin  and  other  non-English  languages 
are  needed  for  teachers  of  these  languages,  or  for  academic 
specialization,  let  these  subjects  be  taught  as  a  part  of  the 
regular  technical  courses  in  either  the  college,  or,  by  option, 
in  the  high  schools  with  large  enough  groups  specializing 
in  these  lines,  and  with  sufficient  teachers  and  money  to 
give  fundamental  education  for  all  as  well  as  technical  or 
academic  preparation  for  the  few.  Beyond  requiring  Eng- 
lish and  recommending  sequence  in  courses,  perhaps  little 
should  be  demanded  along  other  than  absolutely  essential 
lines.  On  the  other  hand,  every  American  college  should, 
as  soon  as  possible,  refuse  to  accept  students  who  have  not 
studied  hygiene,  citizenship,  appHed  ethics,  elementary  ap- 
plied economics,  English,  general  science,  and  perhaps  a  few 
other  fundamental  subjects.  It  is  both  safe  and  patriotic 
to  demand  essentials  for  democracy  and  rural  life.  If  col- 
leges will  study  the  causes  of  failure  of  students,  and  will 
report  to  the  high  schools  on  the  relative  success  of  their 
former  pupils,  giving  reasons  for  failures,  if  they  will  in- 
sist upon  good  methods  and  high  standards  of  work,  and 
if  they  will  use  their  great  power  to  influence  rural  high 
schools  really  to  do  something  socially  effective  for  the 
country,  most  of  the  necessary  readjustment  between  the 
two  institutions  will  be  easily  effected. 

II.    What  Leading  Educators  Say  About  Entrance 
Requirements 

From  a  professor  of  education  in  a  Western  State  uni- 
versity we  obtained  the  following  judgment  on  this  question; 

A  State-supported  institution  must  admit  to  its  student  body 
students  of  moderate  ability  who  would  properly  be  excluded  by  in- 
stitutions established  and  financed  by  private  or  denominational 
agencies.  It  cannot  establish  an  intellectual  aristocracy.  If  this 
principle  is  embarrassing  because  of  the  presence  of  students  who  are 
unable  to  take  advantage  of  traditionally  scholarly  lines  of  work, 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND    COLLEGE   DEMANDS  325 

other  lines  of  work  must  be  established  better  fitted  to  such  students. 
...  I  believe  in  differentiation  of  entrance  requirements  for  the  sev- 
eral courses.  ...  In  this  connection  it  should  always  be  remembered 
that  high-school  students  often  fail  to  know  until  late  in  their  high- 
school  work  what  they  wish  to  do  in  the  matter  of  further  education. 
.  .  .  When  a  student  wakes  up  to  the  idea  of  taking  a  course  in  the 
university  for  which  his  high-school  course  was  not  exactly  the  best 
preparation,  he  should  be  allowed  to  match  up  in  the  university.  .  .  . 
Our  State  universities  should  not  refuse  to  accept  any  student  who  is 
approved  for  higher  educational  work  by  a  high  school  in  his  State. 
...  I  think  high-school  men  ought  specifically  to  express  an  opinion 
as  to  the  ability  of  a  student  to  take  up  this  or  that  course.  ...  As 
to  what  subjects  should  be  accepted,  .  .  .  university  men  should  be 
liberal  in  allowing  high  schools  to  meet  local  demands. 

From  the  dean  of  the  school  of  education  in  an  Eastern 
university: 

I  am  committed  to  the  policy  of  admitting  to  college  any  stu- 
dent who  has  completed,  with  creditable  grades,  any  good  four-year 
high-school  course,  regardless  of  the  studies,  and  who  has  the  recom- 
mendation of  the  faculty  as  one  fit  to  profit  by  college  work.  Further, 
I  would  admit  any  student  past  twenty-one  years  of  age,  without  a 
full  secondary  course,  on  probation,  and  if  he  proves  in  the  course  of 
the  first  year  that  he  is  able  to  carry  college  courses  with  credit,  I 
would  cancel  all  conditions  against  him. 

From  the  dean  of  the  school  of  education  in  a  central 
State  university: 

The  school  of  liberal  arts  in  any  State  college  should  accept  for 
entrance  four  years  of  high-school  work  without  specification  of  what 
the  units  studied  in  the  four  years  should  be.  .  .  .  It  has  been  my 
impression  for  some  time,  and  this  impression  is  supported  by  some 
figures  collected  recently,  that  the  university  can  get  as  good  results 
in  particular  fields  as  at  present  by  having  the  student  begin  work  in 
those  fields  without  preliminary  work  in  the  same  fields  in  the  high 
school.  .  .  .  The  high  school  should  determine  what  subjects  best 
fit  the  student  for  life;  the  university  should  accept  these  for  entrance, 
and  should  in  the  first  two  years  supplement  the  work  of  the  high 
school. 


326  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

From  the  dean  of  the  college  of  education  in  a  far 
Western  State  university: 

The  high  schools  know  better  than  the  college  what  work  they 
can  do,  and  the  colleges  should  take  the  graduates  of  the  high  schools 
where  they  find  them.  The  work  prescribed  for  graduation  from  the 
college  can  be  made  whatever  the  college  desires,  but  there  should  be 
abundant  opportunity  to  get  into  college  after  taking  practically  any 
of  the  courses  in  the  ordinary  high  school. 

From  the  dean  of  the  division  of  education  in  a  far 
Eastern  university: 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  entrance  requirements  of  the  University 
of  Chicago  embody  the  important  characteristics  of  a  good  plan  for 
admission  to  college.  The  features  of  this  plan  that  seem  to  me  es- 
pecially desirable  are  as  follows: 

1.  No  subject  other  than  English  is  prescribed. 

2.  The  candidate  is  required  to  do  a  certain  amount  of  consecutive 
work  in  the  high  school  in  order  that  he  may  meet  the  requirement 
of  a  major  of  three  units  and  a  minor  of  two  units. 

3.  A  free  margin  of  five  units  is  permitted,  whereby  progressive 
schools  may  develop  courses  of  instruction  that  seem  particularly 
valuable  either  for  the  purpose  of  meeting  the  needs  of  individual 
pupils  or  for  the  purpose  of  meeting  special  demands  in  the  com- 
munity. 

(The  editor  considers  even  this  plan  too  conservative 
and  expects  more  liberality  at  this  university  soon.  Even 
Yale  and  Princeton  have  recently  shown  a  disposition  to 
meet  the  high  schools  half-way.) 

From  the  head  of  the  department  of  education  in  a 
Western  university: 

It  has  always  seemed  to  me  that  our  entrance  requirements  are 
based  on  the  right  principle.  The  only  fixed  subject  is  the  use  of  the 
English  language.  For  the  remainder  a  wide  choice  is  offered,  the 
university  taking  the  ground  that  while  the  high  schools  may  need 
to  set  certain  fixed  requirements,  it  is  not  the  province  of  the  univer- 
sity to  say  to  the  high  schools  what  these  fixed  requirements  shall  be. 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND    COLLEGE   DEMANDS  327 

On  the  other  hand,  we  feel  very  strongly  that  it  is  best  for  each  high 
school  to  do  those  things  which  in  its  community  seems  most  worth 
while,  and  that  the  university  entrance  requirements  should  be  shaped 
so  as  to  permit  of  such  a  condition  of  affairs.  The  university  later 
may  pass  on  the  quantity  and  quality  of  work  done  when  the  student 
comes  to  enter  the  university;  but  it  ought  not  to  prescribe  its  char- 
acter for  all  the  high-school  students. 

These  statements  may  stand  as  the  general  judgment  of 
our  educational  experts.  The  writer  would  go  beyond  these 
and  urge  colleges  to  require  students  to  present  evidence  not 
only  of  English  study  but  of  knowledge,  skill,  and  ideals  in 
each  of  the  five  lines  of  social  demands  of  our  democracy. 


III.    Non-English  Languages  Amy  Non-Arithmetical 
Mathematics 

The  alternative  of  eliminating  all  requirements  that  do 
not  relate  closely  to  the  five  factors,  frequently  reiterated, 
of  (i)  health,  (2)  vocational  (including  domestic)  efficiency, 
(3)  citizenship,  (4)  morality  (and  social  service),  and  (5) 
harmless  enjoyment,  has  hardly  been  considered  in  this 
country.  Colleges  have  been  more  concerned  with  devising 
means  by  which  to  hold  the  high  school  in  the  ruts  of  tradi- 
tion rather  than  in  stimulating  them  to  do  their  share  in 
educating  the  youth  of  the  land.  Many  would  even  try 
to  use  the  junior  high-school  movement  to  thrust  the  non- 
English  languages  and  non-arithmetical  mathematics  down- 
ward upon  elementary-school  boys  and  girls.  When  the 
entire  history  of  college-entrance  requirements  is  better 
known,  the  truth  of  this  statement  will  be  recognized.  Col- 
leges of  the  future  may  be  found,  however,  giving  special 
credit  for  health  and  physical  development  (or  for  definite 
training  in  these  lines),  for  general  knowledge  of  the  world 
in  which  the  high-school  graduates  live,  for  experience  and 
power  along  the  lines  of  the  principal  problems  of  life  which 
all  people  must  face,  and  which  they  are  to-day  facing 


328  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

poorly  because  of  the  lack  of  a  thoroughgoing  socialized  and 
American  education.  Students  of  education  do  not  object 
to  college  requirements.  They  object  to  requirements  of  the 
less  valuable  in  place  of  the  absolutely  essential. 

Arguments  for  the  Non-English  Languages. — It  seems 
desirable  to  outline  briefly  some  of  the  reasons  for  the 
elimination  of  the  requirements  of  the  variously  stated 
number  of  "units"  in  algebra,  geometry,  Latin,  Greek, 
French,  German,  etc.,  both  for  the  general  student  body 
and  for  college-entering  students.  We  shall  examine  more 
particularly  here  the  great  burden  of  language  study.  Latin 
was  practically  the  entire  curriculum  of  the  Latin-grammar 
school  out  of  which  finally  came  the  academy  and  the 
modern  high  school.  Some  time  after  the  Renaissance  it 
was  the  principal  college  subject.  Modern  languages  and 
mathematics  had  to  fight  for  college  credit  for  a  long  time 
before  they  got  it.  But  once  in,  the  latter  have,  for  dis- 
ciplinary reasons,  held  their  own.  French  and  German 
were  not  counted  for  admission  until  the  seventies.  The 
influences  which  have  put  the  modern  languages,  for  the 
most  part  German,  into  the  American  high  schools  were 
many,  but  chiefly  the  following  ten  sets  of  facts  and  notions: 

1.  The  rather  servile  imitation  of  the  German  gymnasium 
and  the  French  lycee. 

2.  The  desire  of  many  Germans  in  this  country,  hy- 
phenated and  unhyphenated,  to  keep  alive  here  the  lan- 
guage of  the  Fatherland.  As  a  boy  in  Cincinnati,  the  writer 
studied  in  the  public  schools  under  an  English  teacher  in 
the  mornings,  and  under  a  German  teacher,  speaking  only 
the  German  language,  in  the  afternoons.  In  certain  cases 
one  or  both  of  these  languages  has  been  helped  into  our 
schools  by  foreign  money  and  influence.  Thus  in  German 
centres  a  large  amount  of  time  has  been  misspent  in  teach- 
ing German  to  many  who  could  have  little  use  for  it. 

3.  The  doctrine  of  "formal  discipHne,"  namely,  that  the 
value  of  the  mental  training  which  one  gets  from  certain 


RURAL  NEEDS   AND  COLLEGE  DEMANDS  329 

subjects  is  sufficient  to  justify  them  even  if  they  have  little 
or  no  content  value  for  meeting  any  of  the  great  needs  of 
life;  i.  e.,  that  one  need  not  use  these  languages  in  speaking 
or  otherwise  in  childhood  or  later  Hfe  to  get  more  educa- 
tional benefit  than  could  otherwise  be  obtained  for  the 
same  expenditure  of  time  and  effort. 

4.  The  theory  that  a  person  can  learn  the  languages  in 
school  better  early  in  life  than  in  the  period,  say,  from 
eighteen  to  twenty-two,  a  very  common  notion. 

5.  The  fallacious  idea  of  certain  teachers  that  all  or 
most  college  students  should  study  French  or  German, 
because  they  will  need  to  read  in  these  languages  for  ad- 
vanced scholarship. 

6.  The  fact  that  the  methods  of  teaching  these  languages 
were  organized,  easily  followed  without  much  knowledge  or 
skill,  and  that  until  recently  the  sciences  of  hygiene,  eco- 
nomics, civics,  ethics,  vocational  studies,  home  education, 
etc.,  were  largely  "without  form  and  void,"  or  not  yet  or- 
ganized, selected,  and  adapted  for  use  in  teaching  secondary 
students. 

7.  The  notion  that  students  would  probably  need  these 
modern  languages  for  harmless  enjoyment  of  leisure — in 
travel  abroad,  in  reading  Moliere  and  Goethe,  in  singing  the 
songs  of  these  countries,  and  in  interpreting  quotations  or 
menus. 

8.  The  theory  that  a  knowledge  of  these  languages  along 
with  Latin  and  Greek  contributed  considerable  ability  in 
the  use  of  EngHsh. 

9.  The  notion  that  students  may  just  as  well  as  not 
take  these  languages  while  in  high  school  or  college,  since 
they  have  the  time,  and  many  rather  enjoy  studying  them 
— that  this  is  a  satisfactory  use  of  the  time. 

10.  The  conventional  idea  that  pupils  should  study  these 
languages  because  the  ''best  people"  do  so. 

Refutation  of  These  Arguments. — What  can  the  edu- 
cator say  when  faced  by  this  formidable  array  ?     Our  ques- 


330  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

tion  here  is  not  exactly  whether  modern  languages  have  any 
value.  The  question  always  is  what  knowledge,  habits, 
ideals,  and  appreciations  are  of  most  value  for  meeting  the 
fivefold  aims  of  education  in  this  country  to-day,  the  ques- 
tion asked  so  ably  years  ago  by  Herbert  Spencer,  and  pre- 
viously by  Benjamin  Franklin  (in  his  1789  protest  against 
the  classical  degeneration  of  the  academy  he  had  started 
with  such  high  hopes  in  1750).  Not  what  we  should  like 
to  have  all  pupils  study  if  they  had  twenty  years  for  educa- 
tion and  a  life  of  leisure  ahead  of  them  as  in  ancient  Athens! 
But  what  our  great  democratic  institutions  filled  with  stu- 
dents from  all  ranks  of  society,  most  of  them  never  entering 
colleges,  need  to  help  them  and  America  meet  effectively 
the  issues  of  preventable  poverty,  disease,  crime,  vocational 
and  domestic  inefficiency,  degradingly  used  leisure,  and  a 
generally  low  status  of  educational  and  scientific  opinion! 
Not  what  a  child  of  a  large  polyglot  city  filled  from  many 
lands  by  almost  unrestricted  immigration  may  be  able  to 
use  if  we  wish  to  cater  to  the  use  of  foreign  tongues  in 
America!  But  what  the  country  and  village  boy  and  girl 
in  more  typical  American  communities  must  have  to  help 
the  country  people  provide  a  balance-wheel  to  degenerative 
and  unnatural  city  tendencies. 

But  let  us  look  at  this  decimal  array,  anyway,  and  see 
what  these  opinions  and  facts  amount  to. 

I.  European  Ideals. — There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the 
great  group  of  schoolmen  who  went  to  Germany  for  their 
higher  education  a  few  decades  ago  came  back  filled  with 
the  desire  to  get  into  our  high-school  curricula  the  subjects 
which  they  found  there.  Some  of  these  men,  in  high  places, 
still  revere  the  German  gymnasium  curriculum.  The  falla- 
cies here  were  those  of  thinking  that  the  schooling  devised 
to  accentuate  class  distinctions  and  fit  an  aristocracy  for 
awing  and  ruling  the  masses  should  be  appropriate  here, 
and  that  our  country,  separated  by  an  ocean  far  from 
France  and  Germany,  should  have  any  such  need  of  ability 
to  use  in  intercourse  and  reading  the  languages  which  these 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND  COLLEGE  DEMANDS  33 1 

peoples,  in  close  and  intimate  relationship,  in  peace  or  war, 
very  much  need.  No.  Our  pupils  have  always  needed 
English,  more  and  better  than  they  obtained.  Our  teaching 
of  modern  foreign  languages  has  taken  valuable  time  much 
better  spent  on  this  and  similar  American  problems.  They 
need  Spanish  more  than  they  need  German  or  French,  and 
Spanish  should  be  made  elective  in  only  a  relatively  few 
high  schools  of  the  land.  "  Go  slow  about  introducing  sub- 
jects not  found  among  the  minimal  essentials''  is  a  good 
conservative  rule.  We  are  opposed  to  any  of  these  subjects 
as  general  requirements  for  all  students. 

2.  Immigrant  Demands. — It  was  probably  unwise  to 
let  the  sentiments  of  even  very  desirable  alien  peoples  here 
dominate  curricula  enough  to  make  possible  the  recognition 
of  German  and  French  as  staple  subjects.  This  has  tended 
to  obstruct  the  Americanization  of  our  aliens  by  eliminating 
from  their  possible  courses  subjects  which  function  directly 
in  Americanization,  such  as  American  citizenship,  and  by 
cultivating  such  close  attachments  for  foreign  countries  as 
to  prove  a  menace  to  us  in  our  international  crises.  Why 
not  teach  Spanish,  Itahan,  Japanese,  and  Russian  in  all 
high  schools?  Simply  because  we  have  not  had  powerful 
groups  of  sentimental  zealots  and  outside  forces  to  push 
them  in !  Once  get  a  subject  into  the  schools  and  the  ten- 
dency is  for  the  schoolmaster  and  the  pubhc  to  fall  down 
and  worship  it  as  one  of  the  indispensable  pillars  of  the 
school  edifice!  Our  language  and  our  curricula  must  be 
American.  Through  a  very  few  linguistic  speciaHsts  America 
may,  as  Professor  Snedden  points  out,  keep  thoroughly 
in  touch  with  France  and  Germany.  This  group  may  be 
smaller  than  one  one-thousandth  of  the  number  of  high- 
school  students  who  are  now  compelled  to  study  these  lan- 
guages, even  though  exceedingly  few  learn  them  well  enough 
to  use  them. 

3.  Formal  Discipline. — The  doctrine  of  broad  formal 
discipHne  is  also  untenable.  We  probably  get  a  modicum 
of  general  discipHne,  or  training  in  ^'reasoning,"  in  "mem- 


332  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

ory,"  in  "will-power,"  etc.,  in  any  of  the  supposed  *' facul- 
ties," from  any  similar  groups  of  purposive  activities.  The 
teachers  in  a  large  number  of  Eastern  secondary  schools  and 
colleges,  for  example,  as  shown  in  a  study  by  Thorndike, 
recently  attributed  little  less  *' discipline,"  so  called,  to 
waiting  on  tables  and  playing  on  the  college  football  teams 
than  to  the  old  "classical"  or  "cultural"  subjects. 

The  literature  on  this  subject  is  quite  extensive,  and 
we  have  many  psychological  experiments  to  test  the  old 
theory.  Judd,  in  his  "  Psychology  of  the  High  School  Sub- 
jects," expresses  the  most  conservative  views  on  the  problem 
and  becomes  almost  reactionary  in  meeting  the  arguments 
of  Thorndike,  who  expresses,  in  his  "Educational  Psy- 
chology," the  more  progressive  views.  A  sound  middle 
position  would  be  to  teach  no  subject  unless  it  can  be  justi- 
fied in  content,  or  subject-matter,  as  being  clearly  and  plainly 
worth  more  than  anything  that  could  be  put  into  its  place 
for  meeting  the  principal  aims  of  education.  "Formal  dis- 
cipHne  in  its  sweeping  interpretation  is  an  unproved  hy- 
pothesis for  which  there  are  more  refuting  than  supporting 
data." 

We  cannot  take  the  time  of  students  in  our  schools  to 
teach  them  subjects,  costing  more  per  pupil-hour  than  others 
more  essential,  which  have  little  more  than  vague  opinions 
and  tradition  back  of  them. 

Farm  carpentry,  agricultural,  domestic,  and  commercial 
subjects  are  costly  because  of  the  equipment  necessary  and 
supplies  used,  but  the  studies  of  Professor  Bobbitt  show 
that  the  non-English  languages  and  Latin  cost  per  pupil- 
hour  of  instruction  in  a  typical  city  as  much  as  or  more  than 
do  shop  work,  mechanical  drawing,  and  commercial  subjects 
(10.3  cents  of  a  dollar  each),  while  the  modern  languages 
cost  even  more  (11.4  cents),  the  average  of  all  the  other 
subjects  being  only  a  little  over  seven  cents.  Greek  was 
put  out  of  the  Newton,  Massachusetts,  high  school  only  a 
few  years  ago  because,  as  Superintendent  Spaulding  said, 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND  COLLEGE  DEMANDS  333 

his  cost  accounting  showed  that  Greek  was  costing  far  more 
than  it  was  evidently  worth  to  the  people  supporting  the 
schools,  considering  what  other  education  might  be  pur- 
chased with  the  money. 

Wait  until  the  people  generally  learn  of  such  facts,  and 
their  present  distrust  of  the  formal-discipline  notion  will 
lead  them  to  challenge  effectively  this  overburdening  study 
of  "words,  words,  words,"  especially  foreign  words.  We 
need  some  of  the  wisdom  of  Horace  Mann,  who  early  pro- 
tested against  putting  the  cart  before  the  horse  in  education 
— in  requiring  what  should  be  electives  and  making  elective 
or  non-existent  what  should  be  required  of  all.  If  we  could 
compute  the  number  of  preventable  deaths  caused  by  the 
crowding  out  of  hygiene  from  our  high  schools  in  the  last 
fifty  years,  and  see  the  miles  of  dead  march  by  for  months 
in  columns  of  four,  we  should  possess  in  this  alone  sufficient 
proof  and  intense  realization  of  lamentable  waste. 

4.  Is  Childhood  the  Best  Time  ? — For  those  who  believe 
that  "the  only  time  to  learn  languages  is  in  childhood  and 
not  in  the  college  period, '^  we  refer  to  the  studies  summarized 
by  Professor  Parker,  of  the  University  of  Chicago,  in  his 
volume  on  "Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  Schools"  (Ginn) 
in  a  chapter  entitled  The  Influence  of  Age  on  Learning. 
Here  again  naive  opinion  based  on  isolated  or  peculiar  in- 
stances falls  before  expert  psychological  tests.  The  ability 
to  memorize  and  retain  a  language  vocabulary  increases 
gradually  with  experience  and  age  up  to  about  twenty,  as 
does  the  ability  to  reason  or  any  other  mental  trait.  It  cer- 
tainly does  not  decrease.  Parker  speaks  ably  against  hav- 
ing any  large  proportion  of  high-school  students  studying 
foreign  languages  on  the  grounds  that  they  can  learn  them 
much  better  in  less  time  and  with  less  loss  in  relearning  if 
they  postpone  them  until  the  college  period,  and  that  such 
high-school  teaching  is  poor  social  economy.  We  can  here 
do  little  more  than  refer  to  the  chapter.  More  of  such  open- 
minded  investigation  and  analysis  of  this  problem  is  needed. 


334  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

Practically  all  colleges  now  have  beginning  courses  in  French 
and  German.  Why  not  have  them  for  practically  all  stu- 
dents who  will  be  required  to  study  these  subjects  in  college  ? 
(And  why  not  have  Latin  and  non-arithmetical  mathe- 
matics also  begun  there  instead  of  requiring  them  as  we  now 
do  of  about  a  million  high-school  students  ?)  We  must  con- 
clude that  the  time  to  study  foreign  languages  for  those  who 
are  going  to  college  is  in  the  college  period.  Practically  no 
others  will  need  them  sufficiently  to  exclude  other  subjects 
by  taking  them. 

S'  Are  They  Needed  for.  Advanced  Study? — Parker  meets 
well  also  in  the  above-mentioned  chapter  the  fifth  argu- 
ment, that  students  need  to  study  the  non-English  modern 
languages  in  high  school  because  they  will  need  to  read  these 
languages  for  advanced  scholarship.  We  beg  to  quote  his 
words: 

Let  us  consider  i,ooo  students  who  enter  high  school.  Of  these, 
probably  500  will  not  continue  to  graduation.  Practically  none  of 
the  non-graduates  will  have  occasion  to  use  French  or  German  as  a 
practical  tool  for  further  study.  Of  the  500,  250  may  go  to  college. 
Of  these,  100  may  graduate  and  be  eligible  to  become  candidates  for 
the  doctor's  degree.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact  only  10  out  of  the  orig- 
inal 1,000  will  ever  do  serious  graduate  study  to  the  extent  of  receiv- 
ing the  master's  degree  (that  is,  one  year  after  graduation  from  col- 
lege). Probably  not  5  out  of  the  original  1,000  who  entered  high 
school  will  become  serious  candidates  for  the  doctor's  degree.  Of  the 
5,  some  will  try  to  choose  topics  for  dissertations  in  connection  with 
which  they  will  not  have  to  use  French  or  German.  Of  those  who 
secure  the  degree,  very  few  will  continue  to  do  productive  research 
work  which  will  require  a  reading  knowledge  of  a  foreign  language. 
Many  of  them  will  get  positions  as  professors  in  small  colleges,  normal 
schools,  or  high  schools,  and  do  routine  teaching  the  rest  of  their 
lives.i 

The  professors  of  chemistry  and  of  engineering  in  the 
college  could  be  answered  in  much  the  same  way.     Their 

^  I  recommend  for  reading  also  the  passages  in  Professor  Bobbitt's  "Sur- 
vey of  the  School  System  of  San  Antonio,  Texas,"  on  these  phases  of  wasted 
effort,  as  well  as  his  volume  on  "The  Curriculum'.'  of  later  date. 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND   COLLEGE  DEMANDS  335 

students  after  years  of  study  do  not  gain  facility  in  reading 
these  languages.  They  drop  them  as  soon  as  the  professors' 
backs  are  turned.  They  sensibly  depend  upon  translators 
to  put  into  the  English  technical  journals  and  books  the 
most  valuable  writings  of  the  foreign  investigators.  Most  of 
them  cannot  keep  up  with  even  the  Hterature  of  their  pro- 
fession published  in  English,  let  alone  the  foreign  technical 
journals.  A  questionnaire  sent  by  the  writer  to  five  hun- 
dred graduate  engineers  all  out  of  college  over  ten  years 
showed  that  this  is  true  for  them  and  that  they  regard  time 
spent  on  French  and  German  as  largely  wasted.  Soon  we 
should  have  to  read  Japanese,  Russian,  Spanish,  Italian,  and 
other  languages  to  get  in  the  original  the  chief  scientific 
productions.  The  whole  ideal  is  largely  impractical  and  the 
extremely  few  really  benefited  will  not  warrant  wholesale 
required-foreign-language  study  in  high  schools.  A  few 
specialists  who  really  know  the  languages  can  each  month 
review  for  engineers  and  technologists  the  principal  foreign 
works  in  our  EngHsh  journals  of  technology.^ 

6.  Are  There  Unmet  Demands  ? — These  languages  need 
not  now  be  taught  because  there  is  nothing  else  to  teach. 
Excellent  courses  in  American  citizenship,  in  applied  ethics, 
in  elementary  sociology,  in  industrial,  agricultural,  and  home 
education,  in  hygiene  and  physical  development,  and  so  on, 
have  been  well  worked  out.  Their  pedagogy  is  being  de- 
veloped, some  now  being  organized  as  a  series  of  projects, 
or  problems,  almost  as  closely  chiselled  as  the  "pure''  (un- 
applied and  inapplicable)  mathematics  of  the  old  mathema- 
tician, and  at  least  as  well  organized  for  any  kind  of  "men- 
tal discipline"  as  foreign  languages. 

Besides,  these  socially  directed  subjects  possess  the  tre- 
mendous psychological  advantage  of  having  a  content  that 
is  full  of  suggestions  and  associations  with  the  affairs  of  life, 
making  possible  the  recall,  use,  and  functioning  of  knowl- 

^  See  Professor  C.  R.  Mann's  bulletin  of  the  Bureau  of  Education  on 
"The  American  Spirit  in  Education,"  No.  30,  1919. 


^;^6  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

edge,  habits,  ideals,  and  appreciations  gained,  whereas  the 
pure  mathematics  and  non-EngKsh  languages  connect  ex- 
ceedingly little  with  the  concrete  lives  of  most  people  out  of 
the  academic  world.  It  could  be  truthfully  said  of  many 
high-school  courses  of  the  type  which  conforms  most  closely 
to  the  Unguistic  college-preparatory  ideal,  that  there  are  more 
socially  valuable,  educative,  teachable,  and  interesting  sub- 
jects outside  the  curricula  than  within  them.  We  live  at  a 
fortunate  time  when  first-class  text-books  have  been  worked 
out  for  most  of  the  subjects  which  need  to  be  taught  in  the 
high  school  and  when  each  year  sees  many  marked  improve- 
ments. The  organization  of  introductory  economics  at  the 
University  of  Chicago  as  a  series  of  problems  by  which  stu- 
dents gain  power  to  think  on  the  economic  problems  of  life, 
rather  than  on  those  of  abstract  mathematics,  is  very  sug- 
gestive. Professor  Parker  has  set  a  good  example  to  writers 
of  books  for  teachers,  which  in  the  past  have  been  very 
unpedagogical  and  hard  to  learn  or  teach,  by  furnishing 
with  his  volume  on  ^'Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  Schools'* 
a  volume  of  projects  and  problems  in  application.  The 
new  general  science  texts  and  laboratory  manuals  are  also 
of  a  new  and  vital  character.  Professor  Sharp's  work  at 
the  University  of  Wisconsin  in  the  field  of  high-school  ethics, 
or  moral  instruction  (taboo  for  a  long  time),  is  highly  sug- 
gestive in  another  field.  (See  his  volume  on  "Moral  In- 
struction," Bobbs-Merrill.)  The  books  by  Beard  and  by 
Dunn  on  citizenship  are  of  a  new  order.  The  right  use  of 
leisure,  recreational  and  avocational  activities,  are  being 
developed  and  made  available  for  school  procedure.^  A 
great  wealth  of  educative  material  closely  related  to  the 
aims  of  education  lies  before  us.  Why  remain  bound  to 
the  curricula  of  those  who  were  without  a  knowledge  of 
psychology,  without  subject-matter  outside  of  the  "classics," 

^  See,  for  example,  the  recreational  surveys  of  Springfield,  Ipswich,  Madison, 
and  Cleveland,  all  made  within  recent  years  and  the  first  of  their  kind. 
(Recreation  Division  of  the  Russell  Sage  Foundation,  New  York.) 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND  COLLEGE  DEMANDS  337 

and  were  ''hard  up''  for  something  to  put  into  the  high- 
school  course  to  fill  up  four  years  of  time? 

7.  English  for  Harmless  Enjoyment. — The  a  vocational, 
cultural,  or  leisure  argument  for  the  study  of  foreign  lan- 
guages by  high-school  and  college  students  is  about  the  only 
one  which  seems  to  have  any  weight.  We  are  not  speaking 
of  a  refinement  of  mind,  a  *' discipline,"  but  of  such  harmless 
enjoyment  as  that  of  reading  French  or  German  plays  and 
novels  in  the  original,  of  singing  French  and  German  songs, 
being  able  to  interpret  quotations  in  a  foreign  tongue,  un- 
derstanding French  fashion-terms  and  menus,  being  able  to 
talk  the  language  when  abroad,  and  so  on.  The  answer  here 
is  that  the  pedantic  habit  of  sprinkling  pages  with  a  foreign 
tongue  is  rapidly  dying  out,  that  the  average  high-school  or 
even  college  student  will  never  see  the  Rhine  or  the  Rhone, 
that  admirable  translations  of  the  worthiest  foreign  litera- 
ture soon  appear — far  more  satisfactory  for  study  than  the 
results  of  the  kind  of  knowledge  of  these  languages  even  the 
best  type  of  student  usually  obtains — that  we  can  get  along 
with  the  fashions  and  the  menus  pretty  well  without  sacrific- 
ing years  of  time  in  foreign-language  study,  and  that  in  the 
years  spent  in  such  study  we  could  be  gaining  education  in 
many  types  of  avocations  and  harmless  enjoyment  which  are 
now  denied  us.  We  are  not  organizing  our  high-school  or 
college  courses  especially  for  academic  specialists,  for  the 
leisure  classes,  nor  for  any  who  can  afford  to  fritter  away 
precious  time  and  energy.  Education  in  America  means 
something  else.  Our  schools  have  not  yet  proved  themselves 
very  able  at  teaching  essentials. 

8.  Need  They  Be  Taken  as  Electives? — The  eighth  ar- 
gument, that  students  may  just  as  well  as  not  take  such  sub- 
jects while  they  are  in  high  schools,  shows  a  lack  of  knowl- 
edge of  what  should  be  done  in  the  high  school,  how  little 
time  there  is  for  extras,  and  how  much  time  and  money  is 
lost  by  taking  them.  Many  speak  for  these  languages  in  the 
high  school  with  as  little  comprehension  of  purpose  and 


^^8  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

relative  value  as  the  girl  who  on  being  asked  why  she  was 
studying  French  and  German  in  the  high  school  said:  ^'Oh, 
I  don't  know,  really.  People  ask  you  what  language  you 
have  studied,  you  know,  and  you  Hke  to  have  something  to 
tell  them." 

We  shall  let  Professor  Parker  meet  this  argument.  In 
the  above-mentioned  chapter  he  says: 

Putting  together  the  psychological  evidence  concerning  the  fa- 
cility with  which  a  reading  knowledge  or  the  vocabulary  of  a  language 
is  acquired  at  different  ages,  and  the  facts  concerning  the  enormous 
social  waste  that  is  entailed  by  requiring  or  advising  students  to  begin 
the  study  of  foreign  languages  early,  we  feel  justified  in  maintaining 
that  in  most  cases  the  study  of  a  foreign  language  should  be  begun  in 
later  adolescence  (from  eighteen  to  twenty-two  years  of  age),  when 
the  few  students  who  will  use  the  language  begin  to  arrange  their 
elections  of  studies  with  definite  reference  to  a  practical  goal  in  con- 
nection with  which  they  will  use  them.  .  .  . 

Inasmuch  as  over  90  per  cent  of  high-school  students  will  Dot 
have  occasion  to  use  a  foreign  language  as  a  practical  tool  in  later 
life,  we  shall  avoid  an  enormous  social  waste  (of  community  money, 
teacher's  time  and  energy,  and  student's  time  and  energy)  by  making 
little  or  no  provision  for  the  study  of  a  foreign  language  by  most 
students  in  American  high  schools.  Those  who  will  use  it  as  a  prac- 
tical tool  in  reading  may  begin  to  learn  it  when  it  becomes  reasonably 
certain  which  students  they  are.  If  they  are  to  be  candidates  for  the 
degree  of  Doctor  of  Philosophy,  as  many  of  those  are  who  use  the 
language  as  a  tool  for  studying,  they  can  learn  French  in  one  year 
and  German  in  two  years  during  their  college  course. 

Moreover,  learning  the  language  at  this  period  will  obviate  the 
waste  of  time  ordinarily  entailed  in  relearning  the  language  when  it 
has  been  studied  early  in  life.  That  this  necessity  of  relearning  is  a 
serious  fact  is  shown  by  the  large  numbers  of  failures  in  efficiency  and 
reading  examinations  in  French  and  German  by  students  in  college 
who  have  studied  the  languages  from  two  to  ten  years  before  taking 
the  examination. 

Our  own  argument  has  been  stated.  American  high 
schools  are  typically  very  small  and  poorly  supported,  with 
only  time  to  teach  some  of  the  essentials.  These  languages 
are  not  essentials.    Time  is  the  most  precious  thing  in  the 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND   COLLEGE  DEMANDS  339 

student^s  life.  It  would  be  desirable  if  the  elementary 
and  high-school  period  could  be  reduced  from  twelve  to 
eleven  years  and  the  college  period  to  three. 

9.  Do  They  Help  Much  in  Use  of  English  ? — The  ninth 
argument  is  that  a  study  of  the  non-English  languages  gives 
one  proficiency  in  the  use  of  English.  Professor  Starch  has 
met  this  argument  by  a  scientific  investigation.  And  one 
ounce  of  accurate  scientific  investigation  is  worth  tons  of 
opinions,  resolutions,  and  surmises.  In  his  article  entitled 
''Some  Experimental  Data  on  the  Value  of  Studying  For- 
eign Languages, '*  in  the  School  Review ,  of  recent  date,  he 
gives  the  results  of  extensive  investigations  in  this  field. 
The  average  marks  of  students  in  high  school  and  college 
failed  to  increase  significantly  with  the  number  of  years 
the  various  students  had  studied  foreign  languages,  from 
o  to  15,  in  actual  tested  ability  to  use  the  English  language, 
''good  usage."  In  fact,  the  average  scores  for  correctness 
of  usage  of  university  juniors  and  seniors  decreased  with 
the  number  of  years  they  had  studied  foreign  languages. 
The  more  they  studied  French  and  German,  the  less  ability 
they  showed  in  correct  usage. 

Professor  Starch  necessarily  attributes  some  increase  of 
knowledge  of  ''grammar"  shown  to  the  influence  of  the 
foreign-language  study,  but  this  may  largely  be  accounted 
for  by  the  fact  that  many  students  study  English  grammar  in 
the  high  school  and  that  the  rhetoric  in  high  school  and  col- 
lege and  the  constant  writing  of  themes  gives  considerable 
insight  into  grammar  aside  from  foreign-language  study. 
Furthermore,  he  finds  that  "Latin  obviously  has  no  advan- 
tage over  any  other  foreign  language  in  increasing  gram- 
matical knowledge  or  usage  of  English."  The  reader  is  re-t 
ferred  to  the  statistics  in  the  article  itself.  Such  tests  may 
readily  be  repeated  at  other  institutions.  On  this  and 
other  similar  evidence  we  may  conclude  that  knowledge, 
skill,  and  taste  in  Enghsh  evidently  cannot  be  obtained  by 
studying  something  else,  and  that  even  if  there  are  slight 


340  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

additions  to  ability  in  English  from  foreign-language  study, 
they  are  bought  at  an  exorbitant  price.  And  if  there  is  an 
increase  in  grammatical  knowledge,  such  knowledge,  as 
shown  by  many  tests,  does  not  correlate  with  ability  to  use 
good  English.^ 

Other  data  appearing  in  School  and  Society  for  August  14, 
1915,  and  November  20,  1915,  bear  out  the  same  general 
conclusion.  A  little  more  scientific  investigation  of  this 
group  of  problems  will  be  sufficient  to  prove  the  general 
proposition.  The  efforts  and  pleas  of  Benjamin  Franklin 
and  of  those  who  started  high  schools  here  to  achieve  real 
democratic  secondary  education  may  yet  be  realized.  The 
rural  consolidated  school  with  its  probable  six-year  high- 
school  course  must  fight  for  the  essentials  of  rural  educa- 
tion or  degenerate  into  formalism  like  all  its  predecessors, 
the  grammar-school,  the  German  gymnasium,  the  French 
lycee,  the  English  public  school,  and  the  old  American 
four-year  high  school  of  the  time  of  the  "Committee  of 
Ten." 

10.  Should  They  Be  Required  or  Elected  Because  It  Is  the 
Thing  to  Do? — The  "conventional"  value,  although  strong 
for  getting  students  to  take  foreign-language  studies  includ- 
ing "the  classics,"  has  no  weight  as  an  argument  for  costly 
courses  in  our  American  high  schools.  Booker  T.  Washing- 
ton said  that  after  the  Civil  War  the  negroes  had  but  two 
great  aims  in  life.  One  was  to  hold  office,  thus  reahzing  their 
sovereignty  as  free  citizens,  and  the  other  was  to  study 
Latin.  The  latter  meant  to  them  a  liberal  education.  The 
"young  folks"  of  their  wealthy  owners  had  been  going  North 
for  Latin,  with  some  French  and  German,  and  had  come  back 
able  to  chant  certain  cabalistic  conjugations,  thus  striking 
awe  into  those  who  knew  not  the  charm  !  We  have  not  the 
time,  energy,  nor  money  to  waste  in  meeting  such  conven- 
tional, traditional,  aristocratic  aims  as  this  in  our  schools  and 

1  See  chapter  on  Grammar  in  the  editor's  volume  on  "Teaching  Elementary 
School  Subjects"  (Scribner). 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND  COLLEGE  DEMANDS      34 1 

colleges  when  real  culture  and  real  efficiency  must  be  de- 
veloped for  meeting  the  stirring  problems  of  life  which  press 
on  all  for  solution. 

Such  doctrine  is  not  utilitarian  in  the  sense  of  a  mere 
bread-and-butter  aim.  It  is  a  plea  for  ''culture."  Let  us 
make  neither  academic  nor  vocational  specialists  of  our  boys 
and  girls  without  furnishing  first  a  broad  cultural  foundation 
meeting  the  first  aims  of  education.  We  want  American 
boys  and  girls  to  get  an  American  education,  not  a  wooden- 
nutmeg  substitute.  The  ten  arguments  for  the  modern 
foreign  languages  when  examined  are  found  without  force. 

IV.    The  Outcome 

What  has  been  said  above  applies  largely  also  to  the  study 
of  the  dead  languages,  Latin  and  Greek,  and  of  abstract 
non-arithmetical  mathematics,  i.  e.,  algebra  and  geometry. 
We  cannot  here  take  up  the  arguments  given  for  these 
studies.  We  should  attempt  to  prove  by  analysis  and  verifi- 
able data  that  these  subjects  give  no  special  ''disciplinary 
effects"  which  are  more  valuable  to  young  Americans  than 
they  could  obtain  by  other  use  of  their  time,  that  they  do  not 
especially  develop  the  "memory"  or  the  "reasoning  powers," 
or  those  of  "accuracy,"  "discrimination,"  and  the  long  Hst 
frequently  mentioned  by  those  with  vested  interests  in  the 
subjects.^ 

We  should  attempt  to  demonstrate  that  the  thinking  in 
mathematics  is  unlike  that  which  we  must  use  in  meeting  the 
problems  of  life,  as  analyzed  by  Dewey  and  others,  both  in 
method  of  mental  activity  and  in  the  content  or  subject- 
matter.  We  can  gain  power  in  solving  the  manifold  prob- 
lems of  life  by  solving  them,  by  dealing  with  them  in  class 
or  community,  and  not  by  deahng  deductively  with  x,  y,  z, 

1  See  Moore's  new  volume  on  "What  Is  Education?"  (Ginn),  chapter  on 
The  Doctrine  of  General  Discipline ;  also  Moritz's  article  in  School  and  Society 
for  May,  1918.  Bobbitt's  "The  Curriculum"  has  been  favorably  men- 
tioned. 


342  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

or  the  lines  and  angles  of  geometric  figures.  But  we  must 
leave  these  subjects  for  further  examination  by  our  readers 
and  the  investigators  who  are  to-day  busily  studying  subject 
values. 

Why  did  the  schoolmasters  of  the  past  fasten  upon  our 
school  traditions  the  method  of  attempting  to  educate 
children  backward,  indirectly,  abandoning  the  near  and 
the  evidently  educative,  and  seizing  upon  far-off,  hypo- 
thetical subjects  which  only  a  remoteness  from  the  experi- 
ences of  real  life  and  a  very  vivid  imagination  would  ever 
lead  one  to  regard  as  educative  in  any  large  degree?  The 
history  of  education  reveals  that  many  Hues  of  non-reason  in 
the  form  of  blind  imitation,  mere  tradition,  and  other- 
worldly aristocracy  gradually  converged  to  bring  about  this 
anomalous  situation  to-day.  Fixing  our  eyes  on  the  social 
aims  of  education,  on  the  nature  and  needs  of  the  youth  to 
be  educated,  and  perseverance  in  the  scientific  evaluation  of 
subject-matter,  results,  and  methods  are  the  only  means 
which  will  help  us  to  break  away  and  inventively  and  cre- 
atively to  construct  the  cultural^  education  of  future  Amer- 
ica. For  rural  education  in  consolidated  schools,  the  need 
of  constant  use  of  such  a  method  of  establishing  a  real 
country  education  for  country  people  constitutes  nothing 
less  than  a  social  emergency  in  these  early  years  of  its  de- 
velopment.    We  urge  Uberty  for  experimental  adjustment. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  What  special  applications  to  the  consolidated  rural  school  can  you 

make  from  the  principles  developed  by  Professor  Bobbitt  in 
his  volume  on  "The  Curriculum"? 

2.  What  important  domestic  problems  which  women  meet  on  taking 

responsibility  for  a  rural  household  are  untouched  by  the  or- 
dinary home-economics'  curricula  for  girls?  Could  the  school 
wisely  undertake  to  prepare  girls  for  these  responsibilities,  con- 
sidering other  demands  on  the  time  available  for  schooling? 

1  See  Dewey's  definitions  and  discussions  of  culture  and  character  in  Mon- 
roe's "Cyclopedia  of  Education." 


RURAL  NEEDS  AND  COLLEGE  DEMANDS  343 

3.  Which  of  the  college-entrance  plans  suggested  by  the  writers  of 

the  letters  in  the  chapter  fit  best  your  own  State  colleges  ? 

4.  What  additions  to  the  argument  for  the  elimination  of  so  much 

foreign  and  dead  language  study  in  rural  high  schools  can  you 
make? 

5.  Which  of  the  arguments  of  the  editor  would  you  contest? 

6.  What  phases  of  history  are  of  most  value  to  rural-school  pupils, 

elementary  and  high? 

7.  What  recreational,  avocational,  or  cultural  needs  of  country  folk 

as  you  know  them  are  poorly  met  by  the  typical  rural  high 
school?  Do  algebra,  geometry,  Latin,  French,  and  German 
satisfy  these  needs? 

8.  If  possible,  secure  a  survey  of  rural  recreation  made  by  some  com- 

petent persons,  and  note  the  cultural  needs  there  set  forth. 

9.  What  parts  of  the  United  States  are  most  progressive  in  experi- 

mentally developing  real  American  and  rural  curricula  for  meet- 
ing dominant  rural-life  needs? 
10.  How  can  you  explain  the  great  surplus  of  books  and  articles  on 
methods  of  teaching,  and  the  very  few  until  recently  on  cur- 
riculum-making ? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Bobbitt— "The  Curriculum."     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

2.  Inglis — "Principles  of  Secondary  Education."      Houghton  Mifflin 

Co. 

3.  "Cardinal    Principles    of    Secondary    Education."     Government 

Printing  Office. 

4.  Parker — "  Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  Schools."     Ginn. 

5.  Johnston — "  High  School  Education  "  and  "  The  Modern  High 

School." 

6.  Monroe — "  Principles  of  Secondary  Education."     Macmillan. 

7.  Moore — "  What  Is  Education?  "     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

8.  Vogt— "  Rural  Sociology."    Appleton. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

THE  OUTSIDE  OF  THE  CUP— RELATIVE  VALUES 
IN  ENGLISH  INSTRUCTION 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  types  of  fiction  and  essays  have  been  collected  that  develop 

high  ideals  of  country  life  ?  (See,  for  example,  Bowman's  books, 
published  by  Scribners.) 

2.  Do  any  of  these  compare  well  in  their  contribution  to  the  funda- 

mental aims  of  rural  education  with  "selections"  now  used? 

3.  What  books  and  magazines  could  well  be  incorporated  in  the  read- 

ing courses  of  junior  and  senior  high-school  youth  ? 

4.  What  is  the  most  common  form  of  writing,  of  "composition,"  that 

people  do  in  ordinary  rural  life?  Where  could  these  letters  be 
found  ? 

5.  What  per  cent  of  the  composition  time  in  school  is  devoted  to 

training  in  letter-writing?  Would  the  defects  and  merits  in  the 
collected  correspondence  of  a  typical  rural  county  for  one  year 
indicate  that  the  time  spent  was  sufficient  for  ordinary  people? 

I.    The  New  Aims  of  English  Teaching 

One  of  the  former  '^best  sellers''  by  a  well-known  author 
bears  the  curious  title,  **The  Inside  of  the  Cup,''  which  he 
justifies  by  an  apt  biblical  reference.  This  suggested  the 
title  for  the  present  chapter,  which  is  incorporated  here  more 
as  an  illustration  of  how  to  use  the  social  aims  of  education 
in  selecting  all  subject-matter  than  because  of  the  supreme 
value  of  English.  My  text  is  taken  from  the  writings  of  a 
modern  religious  teacher  and  diplomat.  He  says  somewhere 
that  we  should  all  drink  deep  from  the  cup  of  knowledge,  but 
warns  us  that  we  must  not  become  so  deeply  engrossed  in 
the  beauty  of  the  tracery  and  the  coloring  of  the  designs  on 
the  cup  as  to  fail  to  drink  and  pass  on  refreshed  and  in- 
vigorated. 

M4 


THE   OUTSIDE   OF   THE  CUP  345 

The  peculiar  temptation  and  sin  of  the  teacher  is  to  be- 
come engrossed  in  the  study  of  the  vessel  of  knowledge  and  to 
forget  his  function  as  the  nourisher  of  souls.  It  is  especially 
the  temptation  of  teachers  of  English,  although  the  mathe- 
matician, the  historian,  the  linguist,  and  the  scientist  in 
their  teacher's  chairs  all  likewise  succumb.  Teachers  of 
English  have  before  them  a  multitude  to  be  fed  with  Kving 
education;  they  have  the  greatest  opportunity  available  in 
the  schools  of  to-day  to  mould  the  character  of  the  American 
people;  their  chief  fault,  which  we  attempt  here  to  dissect 
and  diagnose  in  order  to  cure  and  prevent,  is  that  of  not  dis- 
covering and  reaUzing  their  peculiar  social  function.  Too 
often  they  are  not  guided  by  the  great  aims  of  education, 
but,  turning  away  from  Hfe,  they  fix  their  gaze  on  the  tech- 
nical linguistic  properties  of  the  so-called  classics  and  of  the 
compositions  they  teach.  They  become  engrossed  in  the  con- 
templation of  the  outside  of  the  cup. 

Relative  Values  and  Educational  Aims. — An  understand- 
ing of  relative  values  in  the  teaching  of  English  can  come  only 
from  a  study  of  educational  purposes  and  aims.  A  thing  is 
good  or  bad,  valuable,  less  valuable,  or  valueless,  in  so  far  as 
it  functions  more  or  less  efficiently  in  the  achievement  of  the 
purpose  for  which  it  is  used.  The  teacher  of  English,  in  the 
upper-graded  or  six-year  high  school  especially,  performs 
part  of  the  work  of  educating  boys  and  girls  in  early  adoles- 
cence. Her  work  must  contribute  to  the  aims  of  education 
in  this  period.  If  we  can  get  before  us  the  principal  purposes 
of  schooling,  we  can  obtain  standards  by  which  to  judge  the 
relative  values  of  all  teaching  and  of  the  special  work  of  the 
teachers  of  English. 

The  traditional  aim  of  schooling  inherited  by  the  high 
and  upper-grade  school  is  that  of  formal  discipline,  which 
impKes  that  it  does  not  matter  what  we  study,  provided 
that  we  agonize  over  it  sufficiently.  This  relic  of  medieval 
asceticism  was  originally  brought  forward  to  justify  the  ped- 
ant schoolmasters  in  holding  the  only  subject  which  they 


34^  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

could  teach,  namely,  Latin  grammar,  in  the  Latin-grammar 
schools  after  the  time  of  Elizabeth,  Bacon,  and  Milton, 
when  Latin  went  out  of  use  as  the  language  of  scholarship 
and  diplomacy.  Other  names  for  this  aim  of  teaching,  such 
as  "mental  discipline,"  "mind- training,"  "culture,"  "de- 
velopment of  the  mental  faculties,"  "training  of  the  powers 
of  reasoning,  concentration,  discrimination,  memory,  etc.," 
were,  and  are  still,  commonly  used.  The  principal  of  a  large 
secondary  school  said  to  the  writer  only  recently  that  he 
wanted  algebra  and  Latin  taught  in  the  first  year  in  order 
to  give  his  students  "minds  to  work  with,"  to  "develop 
their  power  to  remember  and  to  think."  It  is  little  wonder 
that  the  English  teacher,  who  for  a  long  time  was  not  recog- 
nized by  classical  teachers  and  the  colleges  because  she  did 
not  hold  to  this  doctrine,  finally  came  around  to  the  same 
false  standard  that  English  is  to  be  taught  as  a  discipline 
and  that  all  other  values  are  by-products. 

This  aim  for  both  elementary  and  secondary  schooling 
has  been  rejected  by  all  modern  educators.  We  can  get 
training  and  valuable  subject-matter  at  the  same  time;  and 
the  training  which  is  divorced  from  its  concrete  applica- 
tions will  largely  fail  to  function.  We  must  look  elsewhere 
for  the  aims  and  purposes  of  modern  education.  Any 
scrutiny  of  the  quadrupling  of  attendance  from  all  ranks 
of  society  in  our  high  schools  in  the  last  two  decades,  of  the 
manifold  types  of  work  now  being  carried  on  in  them,  and 
of  the  numerous  grave  social  problems  curable  by  sound 
schooling,  will  show  that  the  aim  of  formal  discipline  is  no 
longer  an  actual  or  sufficient  guide  for  democracy's  public 
schools.  Out  in  the  country,  where  people  are  so  close  to 
nature  and  the  great  vital  facts  of  life,  such  an  aim  for  the 
consolidated  school  is  farcical  and  ignoble. 

The  Fivefold  Aim. — The  chief  social  aims  of  education, 
which  the  leaders  in  education  from  Spencer  down  have 
recognized,  and  which  the  recent  great  educational  surveys 
are  bringing  out  clearly  into  the  lights  are  about  five  in 


THE   OUTSIDE   OF   THE   CUP  347 

number.  They  form  the  principal  aims  because  they  furnish 
the  principal  problems  of  the  American  people.  These 
five  aims,  stated  before  as  phases  of  social  efficiency,  may 
be  reiterated  here  as  follows:  (i)  Vital  efficiency — health 
and  physical  development;  (2)  vocational  efficiency — agri- 
cultural, domestic,  professional,  industrial,  etc.;  (3)  civic 
efficiency — citizenship;  (4)  moral  efficiency — morality  and 
social  service;  (5)  avocational  efficiency — recreation,  harm- 
less enjoyment,  and  the  right  use  of  leisure. 

Most  teachers  in  public  schools  or  elsewhere  will  readily 
accept  these  five  great  purposes  as  the  purposes  of  educa- 
tion. But  these  are  not  the  aims  which  have  established 
either  our  curricula  or  methods  of  teaching.  Our  schooling 
is  not  yet  based  on  them.  For  instance,  about  a  million 
people  die  each  year  in  the  United  States  of  preventable 
diseases  due  largely  to  preventable  ignorance,  and  yet  our 
schools  (especially  the  high  schools)  give  little  or  no  effective 
education  in  hygiene  and  physical  development  for  all. 
The  status  of  our  vocational  (including  domestic)  efficiency 
is  about  as  low  as  is  our  citizenship,  and  yet  most  public 
schools  give  little  or  no  effective  training  along  these  lines. 
In  general,  a  statement  of  the  pressing  problems  of  the 
American  people  which  can  be  solved  largely  by  means  of 
an  education  that  hits  the  mark,  when  compared  with  the 
subjects  and  methods  of  a  majority  of  our  high  schools,  will 
instantly  show  that  we  are  doing  other  things  than  putting 
first  things  first  and  meeting  the  dominant  unmet  educational 
needs  of  our  people.  A  number  of  English  teachers  realize 
this,  and  their  meetings  and  journals  are  taken  up  to-day 
with  statements  of  dissatisfaction  with  the  results  of  their 
work,  a  most  favorable  sign,  since  out  of  such  dissatisfaction 
grows  better  adjustment.  The  best  results  so  far  are  such 
studies  as  the  national  report  on  the  reorganization  of  English 
in  secondary  schools,  new  and  practical  texts,  and  sociaHzed 
courses. 


348  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

n.     Readjusting  the  Subject  to  Rural  Needs 

Application  to  English. — Now  what  can  be  done  to  pupils 
to  help  them  to  produce  the  changes  which  will  promote 
this  fivefold  aim  of  education?  The  psychological  changes 
which  can  be  produced  in  pupils  are  about  four  in  number: 
out  of  our  golden  cup  we  can  pour,  to  all,  educational  nour- 
ishment which  makes  for  changes  in  knowledge,  in  habits^ 
in  ideals,  and  in  appreciations.  With  the  five  aims  arranged 
vertically  at  the  left  of  the  page,  and  the  four  types  of 
psychological  changes  which  we  can  make  in  individuals 
at  the  top  of  the  page,  we  may  make,  by  means  of  vertical 
and  horizontal  lines,  as  shown  in  a  previous  chapter,  a  chart, 
into  the  twenty  squares  of  which  we  can  write  the  minimum 
essentials  of  an  education. 

Then  we  can  ask  of  each  subject  and  course  of  study 
now  in  the  programme  of  studies  this  question:  What  are 
you  contributing  in  the  way  of  knowledge,  habits,  ideals, 
and  appreciations?  What  are  you  doing  for  health?  For 
making  the  home  life  of  our  people  better  and  brighter? 
For  solving  our  grave  vocational  problems?  For  improving 
harmless  enjoyment  and  the  right  use  of  leisure  for  our  people 
who  are  to-day  struggling  for  the  eight-hour  day?  What 
do  you,  Latin,  Greek,  French,  German,  algebra,  formal 
grammar,  or  geometry,  taken  one  at  a  time  for  scruti'ny, 
contribute  to  these  five  great  aims?  What  courses  must 
we  throw  out  entirely,  or,  at  least,  greatly  modify  ?  What 
must  be  put  into  our  courses  to  meet  the  great  problems  of 
morality  and  social  service?  Do  we  need  a  course  in  ap- 
plied ethics?  What  about  citizenship?  Can  we  meet  this 
problem  effectively  by  giving  only  a  portion  of  the  high- 
school  students  a  brief  half-year  course  in  desiccated  ^'dry- 
bone  civics,'^  or  do  we  need  courses  at  least  a  year  in  length, 
with  such  beginning  texts  in  the  grades  as  Field  and  Near- 
ing's  "Community  Civics"  and  Dunn's  ''The  Community 
and  the  Citizen,"  and  in  the  high  school  with  Beard's  ''  Ameri- 


THE   OUTSIDE   OF   THE   CUP  349 

can  Citizenship"  and  others?  What  about  the  methods  of 
teaching  and  relative  emphasis  on  different  phases  of  sub- 
ject-matter and  training?  Is  it  more  valuable  to  know- 
how  to  be  a  citizen  at  home  and  to  help  to  clean  up  the 
community  and  to  work  for  its  welfare,  or  to  pass  good 
examinations  on  the  tenure  of  office  of  judges  of  the  United 
States  Supreme  Court,  the  process  of  impeachment  of  a 
president,  and  on  the  details  of  the  Constitution? 

Now,  bring  English  up  to  the  bar.  What  aims  are  you 
promoting?  Do  you  put  first  things  first?  You  are  the 
only  subject  required  without  alternatives  in  all  high  schools. 
From  being  a  despised  creature,  unrecognized  by  the  col- 
leges, and  even  by  other  teachers  of  the  school,  you  have 
crowded  in  until  in  the  high  school  you  take  three  or  four 
years  of  each  student's  time.  You  are  the  chief  educator 
of  the  child  at  this  age  in  point  of  time  available.  What 
have  you  to  show  in  the  way  of  that  knowledge  and  those 
habits,  ideals,  and  appreciations  which  will  most  effectively 
meet  the  five  principal  educational  needs  of  our  people,  or 
has  English  no  responsibility  for  helping  the  people  solve 
these  five  principal  problems  of  life  connected  with  health, 
vocation,  leisure,  citizenship,  and  morality? 

Do  we  need  you  at  all,  Miss  English?  It  was  formerly 
thought  that  the  other  teachers  of  the  school  could  do  your 
work,  and  they  did  it.  Cannot  children  be  pretty  well 
understood,  and  do  they  not  get  along  fairly  well  in  the 
world,  without  you,  i.  e.,  if  they  miss  high  school  or  drop  out 
in  the  first  year,  as  a  large  percentage  do  ?  Cannot  all  high- 
school  teachers  be  trained  and  compelled  to  correct  gram- 
matical and  other  errors  in  the  speech  and  writing  of  pupils, 
and  thus  save  much  time  now  spent  on  EngHsh  teaching 
in  one  class,  with  a  comparative  neglect  of  it  in  all  others? 
If  we  can  get  into  the  six-year  high-school  courses  the  essen- 
tial educational  subjects  relating  closely  to  the  five  great 
aims  of  education,  and  then  train  our  secondary  teachers  to 
develop  not  only  changes  in  the  information  or  knowledge 


350  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

of  pupils  but  to  develop  also  habits,  ideals,  and  apprecia- 
tions (including  attitudes,  tastes,  perspectives,  prejudices, 
etc.)  for  each  of  the  essential  subjects,  shall  we  find  it 
necessary  to  have  teachers  of  English  at  all?  Probably 
not.  Some  of  these  schools  are  already  trying  the  experi- 
ment of  using  good  literature  in  connection  with  other  sub- 
jects, and  providing  composition  and  oral  English  correction 
in  connection  with  all  school  work.  But  that  time  is  far 
in  the  future;  we  yet  have  a  great  immigrant  population 
for  our  melting-pot,  and  more  will  follow  the  war  unless 
immigration  is  restricted;  and  we  confront  a  present  situa- 
tion. Undoubtedly  it  will  be  of  great  service  for  the  Eng- 
lish teachers,  however,  to  look  upon  themselves  for  the 
moment  as  assistants  to  the  other  teachers  of  the  school, 
who  are  more  or  less  directly  serving  the  ends  of  health, 
citizenship,  morality,  vocational  efficiency,  and  so  on.  The 
teacher  of  EngHsh  thus  has  the  opportunity  to  complement 
their  work  and  do  the  phases  of  the  general  task  which  they 
cannot  well  promote. 

Her  activity  would  then  probably  be  directed  more 
along  the  following  lines:  (i)  The  cultivation  of  those  great 
ideals  and  appreciations  which  make  for  social  efficiency 
and  social  happiness  along  each  of  the  five  lines  indicated 
above;  (2)  assistance  in  the  development  of  certain  abili- 
ties or  habits  along  the  lines  of  both  reading  and  expression, 
such  as  the  ability  in  public  speaking  for  the  aim  of  citizen- 
ship, and  the  reading  of  literature  which  promotes  the  five- 
fold aim;  (3)  assistance  in  methods  of  study,  in  outlining 
and  organizing  tasks,  finding  references  and  seeking  data, 
getting  the  kernels  out  of  paragraphs,  chapters,  books,  and 
so  on;  (4)  especially  perhaps,  the  cultivation  of  habits  of 
harmless  enjoyment  for  the  right  use  of  avocational  interest, 
of  leisure,  which  along  with  ideals  is  apt  to  be  neglected 
by  other  agencies  of  the  school,  this  cultivation  being, 
however,  largely  along  lines  of  the  use  of  the  English  lan- 
guage (including  study  of  the  drama,  goo.d  literature,  etc.); 


THE   OUTSIDE  OF  THE  CUP  351 

(5)  seeking,  by  the  use  of  suitable  literature,  to  strengthen 
the  children  along  lines  neglected  by  other  teachers.  Thus 
the  English  teacher  can  develop  the  emotional  life  of  pupils 
largely  neglected  by  other  teachers,  promote  the  great  ideals 
of  the  race,  and  help  in  all  five  lines  in  fundamental  and 
supplemental  ways. 

III.     Looking  Forward 

Prospective  Changes  in  English  Instruction. — Some  of 
the  principal  changes  which  will  take  place  in  English  teach- 
ing of  the  next  decade  or  two,  following  such  educational 
principles,  we  may,  for  brevity,  venture  to  state  as  follows: 

1 .  The  literature  selected  for  reading  will  be  chosen  on  a 
social  rather  than  on  a  technical,  literary,  or  craftsmanship 
basis.  From  the  great  treasury  of  literature  available  for 
education  along  the  five  lines,  those  productions  will  be 
selected  which  function  best  for  children  and  adolescent 
youth  (the  psychological  basis),  and  from  the  latter  those 
which  are  the  best  examples  of  literary  art.  Last  and  least 
will  technique  be  the  basis;  this  will  be,  not  the  outside 
of  the  cup,  but  what  it  contains  for  American  boys  and  girls. 
First  get  literature  promoting  the  fivefold  aims  of  educa- 
tion; second,  sift  it  psychologically,  using  pieces  which 
have  great  interest  and  moving  power  for  different  indi- 
viduals and  groups,  and,  third,  choose,  if  possible,  good 
examples  of  literary  art. 

2.  Literature  will  probably  not  be  selected  for  the  reason 
that  it  illustrates  the  history  of  English  literature.  The 
latter  subject,  sometimes  taught  as  a  separate  course 
termed  "the  history  of  English  literature,"  will  probably 
not  be  given,  since  it  does  not  meet  the  pressing  needs  of 
our  people  along  the  five  dominant  lines  as  well  as  other 
more  social  and  less  technical  subject-matter.  General  his- 
tory will  thus  have  more  time  for  such  literary  history  as 
relates  closely  to  the  aims  of  history  teaching. 


352  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

3.  The  literature  selected  will  probably  be  largely  mod- 
ern literature,  dealing  with  modern  problems  in  a  modern 
setting  such  as  confront  the  American  people  to-day. 
^'Comus,"  ^'L'Allegro,"  ^'Lycidas,"  ^^1  Penseroso/'  ^'Para- 
dise Lost,"  Burke's  ^'Speech/'  the  ''Sir  Roger  de  Coverley 
Papers,'^  the  ''Essay  on  Lord  Clive,"  and  others  of  this  type 
will  probably  be  displaced,  to  the  horror  of  the  stylist  and 
literary  historian,  by  the  literature  of  the  future  written  in 
the  last  few  decades.  Current  magazines  and  newspapers 
will  be  used  even  more  than  six  to  ten  minutes  a  day,  as 
they  are  now  so  well  being  used  in  many  schools.  Of  course 
we  may  go  to  ancient  Greece  for  some  literature  that  gives 
by  contrast  and  novelty  great  ideals  of  health  and  citizen- 
ship, but  not  necessarily.  We  are  to  choose  the  literature 
that  does  the  work,  and  are  thus  interested  rather  in  the 
psychological  and  sociological  effects  of  these  selections  as 
taught  in  the  school  than  in  the  selections  as  archeological 
specimens. 

4.  Citizenship. — A  reasonable  share  of  this  literature 
will  promote  by  interesting  and  familiar  exa,mple  the  great 
local  and  national  ideals  of  citizenship.  Several  years  ago 
the  writer  went  as  a  school  principal  to  a  large  Western  city 
immediately  after  the  horrifying  exposures  of  civic  indiffer- 
ence and  political  rottenness  there.  Steffens  had  published 
"The  Shame  of  the  Cities";  and  the  shame  was  there. 
Did  the  people  of  that  city  afterward  rise  up  and  demand 
that  the  public  high  schools,  in  which  the  leaders  are  trained, 
begin  at  once  to  engender  ideals,  attitudes,  tastes,  and 
appreciations  along  the  lines  of  effective  local  citizenship? 
They  did  not,  at  least  not  directly.  They  became  vaguely 
dissatisfied  with  the  schools.  They  had  intelligent  people 
go  and  visit  high-school  and  other  classes  and  see  what 
kind  of  education  was  given  there,  which  has  finally  led  to 
considerable  reorganization.  But  little  increase  of  direct 
civic  education  or  of  civically  directed  literary  education 
has  yet  resulted  because  the  guiding  aims  set  up  above 


THE  OUTSIDE  OF  THE  CUP  3  S3 

were  not  consciously  used  as  guiding  standards  for  the 
selection  of  matter  and  methods.  The  fundamental  sub- 
jects are  those  most  closely  related  to  fundamental  human 
needs,  and  these  are,  therefore,  those  closely  related  to  the 
five  aims,  like  hygiene,  and  civics,  and  the  minimal  essen- 
tials of  the  tool  subjects,  like  reading,  spelling,  writing,  and 
arithmetic,  necessary  for  these.  The  reader  is  urged  to 
obtain  from  the  Bureau  of  Education  the  recent  co-opera- 
tive volume  produced  by  the  leaders  in  this  field  on  *'The 
Reorganization  of  EngHsh  in  Secondary  Schools."  Al- 
though conservative  and  not  fully  directed  by  the  great  aims, 
it  will  insert  a  great  entering  wedge  into  the  traditional 
English  instruction.  This  is  the  first  and  best  effort  in  the 
direction  of  English  instruction  guided  by  the  aims  of  edu- 
cation. The  bulletin  on  "Cardinal  Principles  of  Secondary 
Education  "  and  Professor  Bobbitt's  volume  on  "The  Cur- 
riculum" will  also  be  of  value. 

In  what  way  does  your  state,  your  county,  and  your 
community.  Miss  English,  need  a  development  of  civic 
ideals?  Discover  these  weaknesses,  find  these  needs,  and 
then  look  about  for  literature  that  will  do  the  work  desired. 
We  need  not  look  far.  The  ideals  and  efforts  toward  better 
conditions  of  Hfe  to-day  have  found  expression  in  as  noble 
a  literature  as  has  ever  graced  a  previous  age,  and  in  far 
richer  abundance.  This  literature  has  for  most  adolescents 
a  stronger  appeal  and  a  far  richer  and  clearer  suggestive 
value  for  present  life-guidance  than  most  that  the  more  re- 
mote past  has  furnished  for  other  times,  valuable  as  some 
of  it  is.  For  good  content  and  technique  as  well  as  interest, 
Bruere's  articles  in  Harper^ s  Magazine,  for  example,  will 
probably  be  far  more  educationally  influential  than  Burke's 
"Speech  on  Conciliation,"  used  as  an  example  of  exposition. 
Away  with  our  subserviency  to  those  estimable  college  pro- 
fessors of  English  who,  interested  rather  in  literary  technique, 
dissection,  and  the  craftsmanship  feelings  aroused  in  them- 
selves by  certain  selections  than  in  the  use  of  literature  as 


354  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

an  educational  instrument  for  the  American  people,  have 
from  their  high  chairs  handed  down  certain  technical  master- 
pieces for  all  high-school  students,  willy-nilly,  to  study !  We 
very  much  need  a  large  committee  of  high-school  teachers 
to  discover  and  to  try  out  experimentally  a  great  many 
selections  which  tend  to  leave  a  deposit  of  civic  ideals  and 
attitudes  in  our  pupils,  such  literature  as  Mrs.  Cabot  and 
others  have  collected  for  the  elementary  school,  for  instance, 
in  their  volume  on  '' Citizenship."  What  a  great  work  for 
American  citizenship  could  thus  be  done,  and  how  well  then 
could  the  several  years  of  required  EngHsh  be  justified. 
Any  one  studying  the  various  civic  leaflets  issued  by  the 
United  States  Bureau  of  Education  from  the  standpoint  of 
English  can  readily  see  that  English  instruction  can  do  very 
much  to  promote  directly  civic  efficiency  and  still  not  in- 
vade the  field  of  regular  civic  instruction.  In  the  rural 
consolidated  school  the  English  teacher  has  practically  a 
virgin  field,  and  should  be  bound  neither  by  college  nor 
city  precedents.  The  needs  of  the  country  community  in 
the  way  of  ideals  and  aspirations,  of  civic  and  other  social 
standards,  are  the  bases  of  selection. 

5.  The  Ideals  of  Our  Democracy. — If  teachers  of  Eng- 
lish were  to  make  a  survey  of  the  dominant  unmet  needs 
of  the  American  people,  and  were  then  to  make  a  list  and  a 
classification  of  the  ideals  which,  if  made  common,  would 
best  meet  these  dominant  needs,  we  should  have  a  good 
guide  for  the  selection  of  literature  for  our  high-school  pupils. 
A  very  helpful  list  will  be  found  in  Doctor  Bagley's  volume 
on  *' Educational  Values''  (pp.  175-179  and  214-215).  We 
can  only  mention  them  here,  leaving  out  his  descriptions 
and  definitions.  Among  those  great  ideals  which  he  claims 
must  be  made  the  driving  forces  of  all  Americans  we  find 
the  following:  respect  for  the  feelings  and  rights  of  others, 
tolerance,  equality  of  opportunity,  property  rights,  chastity, 
monogamy,  parental  love,  respect  for  the  aged  and  woman- 
hood, sympathy  with  suffering  and  affliction,  self-sacrifice 


THE   OUTSIDE   OF   THE   CUP  355 

and  self-denial,  personal  integrity,  loyalty,  friendship, 
cleanliness  and  personal  purity,  altruism,  achievement, 
truth  loving,  simplicity,  work,  health,  initiative,  indepen- 
dence, patriotism,  national  unity,  local  self-goveriunent, 
right  use  of  property,  ennobled  ideals  of  sexual  love,  ambi- 
tion of  the  right  types,  peace  and  good-will,  unprejudiced 
observation  and  inductive  thinking,  scientific  method,  effi- 
ciency and  expertness,  respect  for  authority,  and  human 
brotherhood. 

The  pedagogy,  or  methods,  of  imparting  ideals  Bagley 
and  others  have  also  treated,  and  we  cannot  discuss  this 
here.  Parents  send  their  children  to  school  to  be  lifted  up 
and  inspired  by  such  ideals.  English  teachers  can  from 
such  a  list  get  a  sense  of  relative  values  in  their  work  that 
the  old-time  teacher,  using  selections  largely  for  their  his- 
torical or  technical  qualities,  never  attained.  Such  an  em- 
phasis upon  the  essentials  of  education  will,  moreover, 
greatly  increase  their  dignity  and  the  respect  for  our  pro- 
fession. It  is  certain  that  the  Boy  Scouts,  Girl  Scouts, 
Camp-Fire  Girls,  and  other  similar  movements,  have  first 
picked  out  the  great  ideals  found  imperatively  necessary  in 
our  people  and  have  then  sought  literature  and  devised 
methods  to  establish  them  deeply  in  the  souls  of  our  people. 

Many  are  the  illustrations  which  might  be  given,  if 
necessary,  of  the  power  of  ideals  in  life  and  of  our  ability  to 
transmit  these  ideals  through  educative  instruments.  A 
teacher  in  a  school  of  which  the  writer  was  once  principal 
used  with  success  carefully  selected  literary  productions  for 
meeting,  generally  well  in  advance,  cases  of  discipline. 
She  used,  I  remember,  among  other  books.  White's  ''School 
Management,"  which  contains  such  selections  to  meet  many 
kinds  of  disciplinary  problems  in  and  out  of  school.  Tem- 
porary and  life-long  ideals  were  undoubtedly  there  culti- 
vated in  many  different  groups  of  pupils.  Professor  Sharp's 
books  on  ** Moral  Instruction"  suggest  many  pieces  of  litera- 
ture that  will  meet  specific  needs  through  inculcating  spe- 


356  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

cific  ideals  and  aspirations.  There  is  a  ridiculous  irony  in  our 
method  of  criticising  people  who  are  products  of  our  school 
systems  for  conspicuous  lack  of  certain  ideals  which  in  no 
part  of  the  school  organization  from  kindergarten  upward 
have  been  taught,  and  yet  which  children  ten  years  of  age 
can  possess  for  life  when  properly  taught.  What  we  want 
in  society  we  must  put  into  the  schools,  and  any  elimina- 
tion of  dead-wood  must  be  rigidly  made  to  make  this  pos- 
sible. 

6.  Avocational  Training. — Training  in  the  right  use  of 
leisure,  in  avocational  activities,  or,  as  Parker  terms  it, 
harmless  enjoyment,  is  rapidly  coming  to  be  a  very  important 
educational  aim  of  the  public  school.  Two  chapters  in 
this  volume  are  taken  to  deal  with  it  because  of  its  com- 
parative neglect  in  rural  regions.  The  late  State  Superin- 
tendent SchaefTer,  of  Pennsylvania,  a  few  years  ago  made 
an  address  in  many  places  against  giving  the  eight-hour 
day  at  once  because  our  people,  untrained  in  the  right  use 
of  leisure,  would  misuse  it  and  bring  about  their  own  degra- 
dation. Here  is  a  great  truth.  The  eight-hour  day  of 
work,  the  eight  hours  of  sleep,  and  the  eight  hours  of  leisure 
are,  however,  rapidly  coming.  The  Saturday  half-holiday 
and  various  picnic  and  other  days  are  now  here  for  many 
country  people.  A  life  of  constant  labor  defeats  the  end  of 
existence.  Happiness  and  self-realization  are  impossible. 
*'Life  as  a  fine  art"  is  out  of  the  question.  We  are  going 
to  obtain  leisure,  and  the  school  and  the  English  teacher, 
especially,  must  train  for  this  phase  of  life.  The  county 
and  state  travelling,  circulating,  and  school  libraries  must 
be  made  to  do  their  share. 

How  can  literature  be  used  to  promote  the  harmless  en- 
joyment of  leisure  ?  Undoubtedly  a  reasonable  and  health- 
ful amount  of  reading  of  the  right  kind  would,  for  enjoy- 
ment alone,  be  desirable  for  most  persons.  This  reading 
will  be  of  the  most  varied  kind,  because  of  the  great  natural 
variability  among  individuals,   and  because  of  the  many 


Reproduced  by  courtesy  of  R.  E.  Staley 
The  library  wagon  of  Washington  County.  Maryland,  stopping  at  a  farmhouse 


A  well  used  library  room 


THE   OUTSIDE   OF  THE   CUP  357 

artificial  variations  brought  about  by  the  manifold  occupa- 
tions and  environments  of  life  to-day.  People  who  do  not 
like  the  Atlantic ,  Harper^Sj  and  Scrihfier^s,  but  who  do  care 
for  the  newspapers,  Adventure,  Detective  Stories,  The  Ar- 
gosy, the  Scientific  American,  the  Saturday  Evening  Post,  or 
Modern  Electricity,  cannot  be  classed  once  and  forever  by 
the  EngHsh  teacher  as  perverted,  hopeless,  and  uncultured. 
A  number  of  the  stories  in  cheaper  magazines  are  of  a  far 
more  healthful  mental  tone  and  better  for  invigorating  and 
emotionalizing  for  a  time  the  life  of  multitudes  of  young 
people  than  are  many  of  the  stories  in  either  Harper's 
Magazine  or  the  Atlantic.  The  best  farm  papers  are  to-day 
securing  literature  of  prime  value  for  rural  ideals.  Yet 
many  times  these  papers  are  unknown  to  pupils  and  parents. 
"Many  men  of  many  minds"  need  literature  of  many  kinds, 
Many  teachers  have  shown  that  these  magazines  and 
newspapers  of  many  kinds  can  be  procured  by  the  average 
school,  and  that  pupils  and  parents  may  gain  habits  of  harm- 
less enjoyment  through  reading  initiated  by  those  English 
teachers  who  follow  the  ordinary  laws  of  habit  formation, 
starting  with  the  natural  instincts  and  interests,  giving  much 
practice  and  repetition  in  a  favorable  social  situation,  and 
studying  the  social  situation  in  order  to  insure  that  the 
habits  shall  find  stimuli  in  the  outside  envirormaent  away 
from  the  classroom.  Other  teachers  have  done  the  same. 
I  look  forward  to  the  time  when  such  teaching  may  be  or- 
ganically related  to  the  English  work,  so  that  six  or  more 
minutes  may  not  have  to  be  taken  out  of  the  regular  lesson 
as  somewhat  extraneous  work.  The  reading  habit  is  im- 
portant for  the  social  welfare.  It  is  far  more  valuable  than 
many  of  the  habits  inculcated  in  the  ordinary  routine  school 
work  of  the  usual  type.  Let  us  have  the  courage  to  put  our 
work  in  touch  with  the  world  to-day,  and  be  proud  of  it. 
Harmless  enjoyment  and  recreation  are  great  needs,  as  our 
*' movies,"  dance-halls,  and  many  other  institutions  thriving 
on  this  interest  indicate.    Here  we  find  English  in  touch 


358  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

with  the  old  cultural,  aristocratic  ideals  of  the  subject,  and 
at  the  same  time  becoming  democratic  and  social.  It  is 
bringing  leisure  and  culture  rightly  used  into  the  home  of 
the  many,  which  is  a  large  part  of  the  mission  of  America. 

7.  Moral  Efficiency. — What  are  the  moral  problems  of 
your  community  and  of  modern  life?  What  examples  can 
you  choose  from  literature  which  will  function  in  helping 
high-school  graduates,  or  leavers-before  graduation,  to  meet 
the  insidious  and  character-straining  temptations  of  the 
world  of  industry  and  social  life  to-day?  Do  we  possess 
any  literature  dealing  effectively  and  artistically  with  these 
problems,  that  will  arm  pupils  beforehand  to  meet  the  foe, 
under  whatever  guise,  with  the  right  attitude?  Undoubt- 
edly any  one  month's  issue  of  the  magazines  will  furnish 
several  such.  ''Seek  and  ye  shall  find.''  We  do  not  need 
to  rub  in  the  moral.  The  right  literature  does  its  own  work, 
without  extensive  moralizing  and  ''intensive"  dissection. 
At  present  many  great  moral  and  social  problems  of  rural 
communities  are  untouched  by  any  school  literature.  In 
fact,  much  of  it  points  to  the  city,  and  is  the  very  same  as 
used  in  the  largest  cities!  We  as  much  need  literature  in 
schools  that  relates  closely  to  rural  moral  problems  as  we 
need  texts  that  relate  closely  to  rural  civic  problems. 

The  average  man  and  woman  engaged  in  a  vocation  to- 
day is  engaged  in  social  service.  The  butcher  handing  meat 
day  by  day  over  the  counter  is  feeding  and  making  strong 
and  vigorous  the  men  and  women  of  his  community,  who 
are  also  working  for  him  in  return.  The  farmer  is  nourish- 
ing the  world.  But  such  an  attitude  toward  his  work,  such 
an  ideal  of  his  daily  business,  seldom  glorifies  the  worker. 
To  him  "business  is  business,"  which  means  that  it  is,  in 
spirit,  an  individualistic  war  to  the  knife  for  advantage, 
supremacy,  and  financial  gain.  The  laborer  watches  the 
clock  through  the  irksome  and  uninspired  day;  the  em- 
ployer speeds  him,  fights  shorter  hours  of  labor,  "boodles" 
the  legislature  to  beat  out  workingmen's  compensation  and 


THE   OUTSIDE   OF  THE   CUP  359 

child-labor  laws,  and  so  on.  The  farmer  is  often  an  unin- 
spired drudge,  very  sordid,  overworked,  reactionary,  and 
individualistic.  Those  who  rise  to  the  dignity  and  pro- 
fessional spirit  of  servants  of  the  public  weal  are  vastly  in 
the  minority.  But  these  few  have  made  professions  of  their 
trades.  Wholesale  arrests  of  butchers  recently  occurred 
because  they  had  put  poisonous  preservatives  into  their 
meat  products  which  destroyed  rather  than  restored  the 
strength  of  their  neighbors  and  fellow  servants.  Farmers 
have  been  found  who  have  fought  or  been  indifferent  to 
community  improvement,  who  have,  figuratively  and  actu- 
ally, put  their  larger  potatoes  and  apples  at  the  top  of  the 
barrel,  who  have  done  right  only  as  a  policy,  not  from  a 
dynamic  ideal  of  service.  Many  blindly  oppose  any  school 
development,  and  then  wonder  why  their  children  so  early 
wish  to  ''break  home  ties."  Cannot  the  generous  social- 
service  spirit  be  inculcated  in  the  pupils  of  the  consolidated 
school  ? 

You  will  answer  that  it  can,  and  that  these  acts  typify 
too  large  a  part  of  the  spirit  of  the  work  of  our  present 
high-school  graduates  and  leavers.  We  are  certain  that 
these  ideals  can  be  engendered  and  that  ideals  do  function. 
We  know  that  abundant  literature,  current  and  more  re- 
mote, can  be  found  to  promote  this  particular  ideal.  The 
Sunday-school  and  the  churches  have  no  such  educative 
opportunity  as  we  possess  with  our  three  or  four  years  of 
each  graduate^s  time.  Here  we  have  another  standard  as  a 
basis  of  selection,  the  choice  of  those  literary  forms  that  most 
affect  our  pupils  for  good,  and  the  test  is  not  how  much 
they  know  about  the  author's  life  or  style,  but  how  much 
they  are  affected  and  what  they  do. 

We  cannot  take  time  here  to  discuss  each  of  the  five 
aims  from  the  standpoint  of  the  selection  of  literature  to 
be  read  in  English  courses  and  elsewhere.  But  we  can  see 
what  an  interesting  and  fruitful  reorganization  of  the  work 
would  result  from  such  a  sense  of  relative  values — from  get- 


360  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

ting  our  eyes  off  the  outside  of  the  cup  and  on  those  things 
which  must  be  put  inside  the  cup  for  the  nourishment  of 
men  and  women.  Our  young  women  of  to-day  are  fortu- 
nately studying  not  so  much  china-painting  and  cut-glass 
as  the  relative  values  of  foods  and  how  to  make  balanced 
and  attractive  rations  for  people  at  various  kinds  of  work. 
They  are  interested  in  facing  well  the  big  problems  of  life 
of  whatever  type  rather  than  in  the  mere  decorative  aspects 
discussed  by  Herbert  Spencer  in  his  "What  Knowledge  Is 
of  Most  Worth."  Art  and  avocations  are  highly  important, 
but  they  must  be  essential  parts  of  the  daily  life  on  the 
farm,  not  something  plastered  on  and  merely  decorative. 

8.  Technical  Aspects. — What  shall  we  say  of  formal 
English  grammar,  the  old-style  technical  works  on  rhetoric, 
and  the  spelling-book  with  its  fifteen  to  twenty  thousand 
words,  formerly  required  of  all  in  either  the  elementary  or 
the  high  school  or  both  ?  The  principles  of  grammar  which 
function  enough  to  be  worth  as  much  to  students  as  other 
changes  they  could  make  with  other  available  subject- 
matter  and  activities  are  very  few  in  number.  Doctor 
Charters  has  reported  the  results  of  his  studies  along  this 
line,  and  Hoyt,  Briggs,  and  the  writer  have  tested  results 
of  the  teaching  of  formal  grammar.  The  few  most  valuable 
phases  of  the  science,  which  function  more  in  meeting  our 
problems  than  anything  else,  we  shall  keep  and  use,  but  no 
more.  Perhaps  even  less  of  the  old  science  of  rhetoric  will 
be  kept,  and  then  not  as  a  science  apart,  pure,  abstract,  and 
logical  (like  the  mathematics  to  which  the  old  mathematician 
aspired),  but  in  direct  usable  relationship  to  problems  of 
expression  and  interpretation.  These  subjects  will  certainly 
not  be  studied  because  they  are  assumed  to  "discipline  the 
mind,"  "form  the  will,"  and  give  a  general  phrenological 
development. 

Doctor  Ayres's  scale  for  measuring  spelling,  with  its 
thousand  words  most  used  and  most  needed  by  our  people 
in  their  correspondence,  will  be  utilized  to  help  determine 


THE   OUTSIDE   OF   THE   CUP  36 1 

minimal  essentials  in  spelling  for  all.  Bailouts  studies  of 
the  vocabularies  of  students  will  be  extended  to  the  high 
school.  The  dictionary  habit  will  be  inculcated  for  that 
great  list  of  occasional  words  required  so  infrequently  as  to 
free  us  from  memorizing  them  all  except  as  they  come  by 
use,  thus  saving  us  time  for  training  of  greater  relative  value 
according  to  our  life-standards.  Ballou's  Harvard-Newton 
scale  and  others  for  measuring  results  in  English  composi- 
tion will  also  be  utilized,  until  superseded  by  better  ones, 
in  this  period  of  rapid  progress.  Some  study  of  the  deriva- 
tion of  words,  not  as  etymology,  but  as  the  words  come  up 
with  separate  lessons  on  principles,  will  be  given,  and 
obviate  the  need  of  studying  Greek  and  Latin. 

Formal  dissection  and  extreme  pedantic  attention  to 
literary  trivialities  of  style  will  give  way  when  the  teacher 
gets  her  eyes  on  what  she  wants  to  do  and  starts  to  do  it. 
"The  devil  finds  work  for  idle  hands  to  do."  And  many 
of  our  able  high-school  students  who  have  read  widely  of  the 
best  literature  at  home  have  regarded  the  teacher  of  English 
in  her  dissection  and  perfunctory  theme-assigning  laboratory 
in  about  as  favorable  light  as  that  suggested.  There  will 
be  much  reading  and  a  minimum  of  style  analysis.  We  are 
not  producing  critics  and  authors.  Students  are  to  be  fitted 
for  a  different  life  and  for  facing  a  great  common  host  of 
clearly  foreseen  problems.  The  methods  outlined  above 
will,  however,  prove  a  better  preparation  for  those  who 
would  essay  authorship.  The  mere  critic  is  barren;  the 
real  author  is  filled  with  life  everlasting. 

9.  Expression  and  Methods. — Now  what  shall  we  say  of 
relative  values  in  expression  and  in  methods  of  teaching? 
Much  has  already  been  indicated,  and  the  process  of  deter- 
mining what  knowledge,  habits,  ideals,  and  appreciations 
are  of  most  worth  to  the  American  people  which  the  teacher 
of  Enghsh  may  well  undertake  to  develop  without  conflict- 
ing with,  but  supplementing,  the  work  of  other  teachers 
has  already  been  suggested.     Since  most  of  our  expression 


362  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

in  life  beyond  and  in  the  school  is  oral  expression,  we  should 
develop  ability  especially  along  this  line.  Since  democracy 
progresses  by  the  self-organized  group  work  of  citizens  meet- 
ing in  assembly  and  since  community  organization  and  co- 
operation fostered  by  public  discussion  is  an  emergency 
need  of  the  rural  population  to-day,  as  suggested  in  preced- 
ing sociological  chapters  of  this  volume,  ability  in  public 
speaking,  before  a  real  audience,  the  "audience  situation  and 
audience  motive,'*  will  be  cultivated  with  particular  care. 
English  teachers  have  burdened  themselves  unnecessarily 
with  re-inking  written  themes.  A  greater  proportion  of  time 
may  well  be  given  to  oral  expression,  to  providing  something 
to  say  and  a  good  excuse  for  saying  it.  Further,  all  teach- 
ers will  be  supervised  and  held  responsible  for  cultivating 
good  expression  in  all  classes.  Since  most  of  the  writing 
done  by  most  people  is  in  letters,  motivated  correspondence 
will  be  emphasized  far  more  than  at  present.  In  fact,  is 
not  letter-writing  the  first  minimal  essential  of  written  com- 
position ? 

Next,  themes  may  well  be  written  on  topics  related  to 
the  five  aims  of  education  as  set  forth  above,  not  forgetting 
the  leisure  side  of  life  to  which  the  English  work,  if  directed 
at  all,  has  been  in  the  past  too  much  directed.  ''  How  We 
Girls  Organized  and  Carried  On  Successfully  a  Food  Sale 
to  Raise  Money  for  the  Boys'  Football  Suits,''  for  example, 
deals  with  community  co-operation  of  a  vitally  important 
sort.  Papers  written  for  the  teachers  of  other  subjects  will 
be  sent  to  the  English  teacher,  often  as  substitutes  for  her 
own  "themes." 

IV.     Emancipation  and  Experimentation 

The  Outcome  in  Socialized  English. — We  need  not  offer 
further  suggestions.  Needless  to  say,  evolution  is  rapid 
now  in  the  direction  indicated  in  this  chapter.  We  are 
bound  in  the  direction  of  a  socialized  education,  and,  in  the 


THE   OUTSIDE  OF  THE  CUP  363 

country,  a  ruralized  education.  If  what  has  been  said 
helps  to  emphasize  this  social  aim  of  education  in  the  selec- 
tion and  use  of  subject-matter  in  English  in  the  country 
and  rural  village,  helps  to  free  the  teacher  somewhat  from 
the  college  classics,  promotes  intelligent  interest  in  rural- 
community  problems  as  the  guiding  stars  of  teaching,  and 
helps  to  keep  the  gaze  of  the  English  teacher  away  from 
the  outside  of  the  cup,  more  than  could  well  be  hoped  for 
will  be  accomplished. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  What  recommendations  for  the  course  in  English  is  offered  in  the 

government  bulletin  on  "Reorganization  of  English  in  Secondary 
Schools"?  (Report  of  the  Commission  on  Secondary  Educa- 
tion, James  F.  Hosic,  Secretary,  Government  Printing  Office, 
Washington.) 

2.  What  applications  are  made  in  this  report  to  the  rural-school  needs  ? 

3.  What  additional  modifications  for  a  rural  high  school  of  six  years 

would  be  desirable? 

4.  Make  a  list  of  suitable  subjects  for  debates  in  a  consolidated  rural 

high  school. 

5.  Do  you  know  of  any  book  on  English  for  the  rural  high  or  elemen- 

tary school  ?  What  does  the  dearth  of  such  books  indicate  with 
respect  to  the  dose  adaptation  of  rural  schools  to  rural-life  needs? 

6.  Where  would  you  find  a  list  of  good  books  from  which  to  choose 

the  beginnings  of  a  consolidated-school  library? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  "Reorganization  of  English  in  Secondary  Schools.'*    Government 

Printing  Office. 

2.  Bobbitt— "The  Curriculum."    Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

3.  The  English  Journal^  Chicago. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
LEARNING  PROCESSES  OF   COUNTRY  CHILDREN 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  Which  is  more  important  for  the  teacher,  a  study  of  what  is  best  to 

teach  in  a  given  community  or  a  study  of  how  to  teach  what- 
ever is  provided  by  text-books  and  courses  of  study?     Why? 

2.  What  do  rural  boys  and  girls  commonly  know  on  entering  school? 

3.  What  are  they  able  to  do?     That  is,  what  skills  and  habits  have 

they? 

4.  What  is  the  character  of  their  ideals,  following  the  list  quoted  from 

Bagley  in  the  previous  chapter? 

5.  How  have  they  gained  these  types  of  knowledge,  habits,  and  ideals? 

6.  At  what  age  are  country  youth  with  only  home  education  able  to 

take  fairly  complete  responsibility  for  a  farm? 

7.  Can  this  concreteness  of  motivated  learning  through  actual  par- 

ticipation under  sympathetic  guidance  be  continued  in  the 
school,  or  must  the  school  be  predominantly  abstract  and  re- 
mote from  daily  life?     Suggest  more  vital  methods  of  learning. 

I.    Learning  and  Education* 

The  Problem  of  the  Learning  Process. — After  consider- 
ing the  nature  and  demands  of  present-day  American  so- 
ciety upon  the  public  rural  school  as  a  supplemental  public 
institution,  the  type  of  buildings,  and  the  curriculum,  one 
must  study  the  nature  of  the  children  in  whom  educative 
changes  must  be  made.  We  cannot  hope  for  great  success 
in  achieving  the  purposes  of  democracy's  rural  schools  if  we 
are  ignorant  of  the  methods  of  change  and  development  in 
immature  mankind — the  most  delicate  and  highly  complex 

^  A  preceding  discussion  of  "The  Educative  Process"  has  app>eared  in  the 
writer's  volume  on  "Teaching  Elementary-School  Subjects"  (Scribners). 

364 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OF   COUNTRY   CHILDREN      365 

living  material  in  the  world.  A  group  of  novices  in  paint- 
ing may  satisfactorily  keep  before  them  the  ideal  and  model 
of  the  desired  finished  product,  but  their  efforts,  no  matter 
how  well-intentioned,  will  result  in  mere  daubs,  and  waste 
of  canvas,  time,  and  supplies,  if  they  do  not  know  how  to 
use  their  materials  skilfully  to  achieve  their  purposes.  The 
plant  and  curriculum  are  necessary,  method  is  essential. 

The  waste  of  the  most  precious  possibilities,  in  the  form 
of  children  sent  by  compulsory  laws  for  a  number  of  years 
to  our  country  schools,  caused  by  teachers  who  have  neither 
definite  knowledge  of  rural  social  conditions  and  social  needs 
nor  of  child  nature  and  children's  needs,  is  to-day  stu- 
pendous and  inimical  to  the  progress  of  civilization  in  our 
land.  Heredity,  of  course,  plays  an  important  part  in  de- 
termining the  general  trend  and  outcome  of  development 
in  children,  but  the  modifying  influences  of  an  educative 
environment  yet  remain  incalculable. 

Our  first  great  function  as  teachers,  after  learning  rural 
social  needs  and  the  subject-matter  and  school  plants  neces- 
sary, is  to  discover  as  soon  as  possible  the  nature  and  technique 
of  the  learning  and  development  process,  the  nature  of  men- 
tal and  physical  growth  in  children.  In  view  of  the  present 
world-wide  evil  results  of  miseducation  abroad  and  at  home, 
we  can  view  the  need  of  more  accurate  and  wide-spread 
knowledge  of  human  development  as  nothing  less  than  a 
social  emergency.  The  future  belongs  to  the  nation,  or 
part  of  a  nation,  that  has  the  thoroughly  socialized  and  effi- 
cient schools. 

Fortunately,  we  have  to-day  for  the  scientific  study  of 
the  learning  and  development  process  in  children  a  thousand- 
fold more  agencies  than  were  but  a  few  years  ago  at  work. 
A  higher  professional  spirit  begins  to  animate  teachers;  the 
influence  of  such  leaders  as  Thorndike,  Dewey,  Montessori, 
and  others,  who  hold  up  the  ideal  of  teachers  as  researchers 
in  methods  of  child  growth,  is  at  work;  the  former  child- 
study  movement  has  been  transformed  into  a  host  of  organ- 


366  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

ized  agencies  for  more  scientific  inquiry  into  child  nature 
and  child  needs;  investigations  and  experiments  by  a  num- 
ber of  individuals  have  been  made  of  methods  of  tuition  of 
individual  children  who  early  have  become  especially  able 
along  social  lines  (''geniuses  '0,  and  even  more  studies  have 
been  made  of  the  education  of  backward  and  feeble-minded 
children;  a  great  awakening  is  imminent  in  the  home  educa- 
tion of  children,  and  we  may  yet  expect  to  find  parents  who 
can  add  much  to  our  recorded  knowledge  of  the  best  ways  of 
guiding  the  fluid  life  of  children  in  the  best  directions. 
Every  teacher  a  natural  and  a  trained  student  of  the  learning 
process  in  children  is  a  most  desirable  motto  for  our  profes- 
sion. To-day  every  thorough  examination  of  large  numbers 
of  children,  such  as  the  simple  Courtis  tests  in  arithmetic 
and  other  subjects  or  the  Terman  intelligence  tests,  for  ex- 
ample, plumbs  deeper  the  depths  of  our  ignorance  of  how 
children  actually  are  changed  toward  increased  social  effi- 
ciency. The  most  hopeful  outcome  of  the  remarkable  and 
successful  movement  for  measuring  results  of  teaching  and 
of  learning  is  the  increased  knowledge  of  how  various  re- 
sults worth  obtaining  are  to  be  achieved.  ''The  psychology 
of  a  ten-year-old  boy,"  says  Professor  Thorndike,  "would 
probably  involve  as  much  subject-matter  for  investigation 
as  the  astronomy  of  the  solar  system  or  the  geology  of  a 
continent." 

II.    The  Physical  Basis 

The  Physical  Basis  of  Learning. — The  modifiable  changes 
which  take  place  in  individuals  are  both  physical  and  men- 
tal, but  it  has  been  the  mental  side  of  the  process  which  has 
hitherto  almost  obsessed  the  schools.  The  most  charac- 
teristic and  striking  phase  of  development  which  actually 
goes  on  in  children  is  physical  in  character,  and  fundamen- 
tally this  growth  and  development  of  the  body  in  health, 
grace,  skill,  and  vigor  is  more  important  to  the  individual 
child  and  to  the  attainment  of  social  ends  than  the  added 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OF   COUNTRY  CHILDREN      367 

psychological  development.  Both  are  necessary  and  should 
be  developed  together,  mental  activity  ensuing  naturally  in 
purposive  action,  but  we  must  always  insure  the  minimum 
bodily  essentials  which  make  the  sound  mind  possible. 

On  the  physical  side  we  are  but  beginning  to  obtain  facts 
regarding  the  actual  health  and  development  conditions  of 
American  children  and  how  these  conditions  are  correlated 
with  school  progress  and  methods  of  mental  development. 
Only  a  dozen  years  or  so  ago  such  facts  were  not  available. 
Recent  studies  indicate  that  our  homes  are  relatively  in- 
efficient in  caring  for  the  children  in  that  they  lose  in  the 
first  year  of  life,  largely  by  preventable  death,  about  one- 
sixth  to  one- tenth  of  all  persons  born,  and  that  before  the 
kindergarten  period  or  first  grade  of  school  age  they  lose 
from  one-fourth  to  one-sixth  of  all  those  who  have  entered 
their  midst.  Of  the  eighty  or  more  out  of  a  hundred  who 
manage  to  pass  safely  through  the  first  two  or  three  years  of 
life,  many  are  in  fair  physical  condition,  but  soon  thereafter 
deterioration  sets  in,  and  by  the  time  children  enter  school 
more  than  half  in  any  one  school  year  will  be  found  seriously 
in  need  of  medical,  dental,  or  psychological  care.  The  Great 
War  has  shown  that  the  health  status  of  our  people  is  very 
low.  Hoag  and  others  have  found  that  these  losses  and  de- 
teriorations are  due  principally  to  profound  ignorance  on 
the  part  of  parents  with  respect  to  the  feeding,  clothing, 
regimen,  and  general  upbringing  of  their  offspring.^ 

A  very  large  proportion  of  the  children  who  finally  enter 
our  schools  each  year  are  in  very  poor  condition  for  engaging 
vigorously  and  successfully  in  the  learning  process.  Other 
investigations  indicate  that  in  any  one  school  year  about 
one- third  of  the  children  of  our  elementary  schools  will  be 
found  relatively  free  from  serious  ailments  and  defects, 
about  one-third  will  be  found  suffering  from  dental  defects 
only,  and  a  final  third  will  be  found  suffering  from  dental 

^  See  Rapeer,  "  Educational  Hygiene,"  chapter  on  The  Home  Hygiene  of 
Children,  and  "  School  Health  Administration,"  chap.  II. 


368  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

defects  also  and  from  other  ailments  of  a  serious  character.^ 
Unless  the  schools  have  thorough  medical  supervision,  in- 
cluding regular  inspection  and  examination,  follow-up  work 
by  nurses  and  teachers,  school  clinics,  open-air  schools,  and 
so  on,  the  elementary  teacher  of  any  grade  may  thus  ex- 
pect to  find  a  large  proportion  of  her  class  each  term 
seriously  lacking  in  the  physical  basis  of  learning. 

A  growing  number  of  carefully  controlled  investigations 
witness  to  the  fact  that  there  is  a  close  relationship  between 
physical  efficiency,  the  health  foundation,  and  mental  and 
moral  efficiency.  A  large  share  of  non-promotion,  retarda- 
tion, and  elimination  from  school  (probably  at  least  one- 
sixth  of  each)  are  due  directly  and  indirectly  to  these  bad 
preventable  health  conditions  of  children. 

Prevention  and  Cure. — That  teachers  and  the  schools 
can  do  much  in  many  ways  to  ameliorate  such  obstructions 
to  learning  without  loss,  and  with  measurable  increase,  of 
school  efficiency  has  been  amply  proved  in  many  places. 
As  the  official  representative  of  the  state  and  of  the  home 
in  the  scientific  care  of  future  citizens,  teachers  thus  have 
as  great  a  responsibility  for  ministering  to  the  children  from 
the  standpoint  of  health  and  school  efficiency  as  from  the 
intellectual  and  moral  standpoints.  That  teachers  have 
not  recognized  such  conditions  in  the  past  and  have  done 
little  to  ameliorate  them  except  in  sporadic  instances  is, 
however,  not  seriously  to  their  discredit.  The  facts  have 
been  but  recently  ascertained  on  a  large  scale;  the  normal 
and  other  professional  training-schools  for  teachers  have 
been  giving  little  or  no  preparation  along  school-health 
lines;  and  the  public  has  until  recently  made  but  few  in- 
sistent demands  of  this  character. 

To-day,  before  they  enter  and  while  in  service,  teachers 

are   equipping   themselves  in  increasing  numbers   for  this 

fundamental  service,  not  only  to  increase  their  teaching 

efficiency  but  to  help  the  community  to  meet  one  of  the 

^  Rapeer,  "School  Health  Administration." 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OF  COUNTRY  CHILDREN      369 

most  serious  problems  of  life — one  of  the  five  large  aims  of 
the  educative  process.^  They  do  this  new  work,  moreover, 
not  merely  from  their  instinctive  and  sympathetic  love  of 
little  children,  but  as  state  officials  engaged  in  a  public  so- 
ciological work,  holding  as  its  motto  Emerson's  truth  that 
''Health  is  the  first  Wealth."  Of  the  motor  basis  of  learn- 
ing, of  growth  in  muscular  efficiency,  and  of  the  general 
educational  movement  to  follow  nature  by  making  school 
life  less  sedentary  and  bookish  and  more  free  and  physical,  as 
in  the  Gary  and  other  experimental  schools,  we  have  treated 
under  the  following  heading,  and  in  other  volumes.  The 
time  has  come  for  constructing  physical  scales  with  which 
to  measure  the  health  and  development  of  pupils  and  for 
determining  the  minimal  essentials  of  physical  education.^ 

Administratively,  there  is  need  of  a  director  of  educa- 
tional hygiene  in  each  county  who  should  probably  perform 
also  the  duties  of  county  health  officer.  His  assistants 
would  be  nurses  and  one  or  more  physical- training  super- 
visors. We  provide  both  a  health-supervision  room  for  the 
use  of  nurses,  doctor,  and  teachers,  and  a  gymnasium,  as 
well  as  emergency  retiring-rooms,  in  the  plans  of  a  model 
consolidated  school  given  in  the  final  chapter. 

III.    Principles  of  Learning 

Fundamental  Principles  of  Learning. — Some  of  the  funda- 
mental principles  which  control  our  guidance  of  the  learning 
process  to-day  are  as  follows:  i.  The  mind  is  fundamen- 
tally the  activity  of  a  connecting  organism  between  stim- 
uli, or  situations,  largely  without  the  nervous  system,  on 

1  The  elements  of  social  efficiency,  namely:  vital,  vocational,  avocational, 
civic,  and  moral  efficiency.  Vital  efficiency  includes  health,  physical  develop- 
ment, etc.,  through  the  following  five  types  of  effort:  medical  supervision, 
school  sanitation,  physical  education,  teaching  hygiene,  and  hygienic  methods. 

2  See  writer's  report  on  "  Minimal  Essentials  of  Physical  Education  and 
a  Scale  for  Measuring  Physical  Education"  (Public-School  Publishing  Co., 
Bloomington,  111.).    . 


370  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

the  one  hand,  and  with  the  muscles,  on  the  other.  That  is, 
mental  activity  is  for  the  purpose  of  adjusting  the  individual 
to  his  environment,  and  the  learning  process  is  fundamentally 
one  of  making,  preventing,  and  controlling  the  development 
of  our  motor  responses  to  environmental  stimuli,  the  life 
situations  about  us.  Simply  illustrated,  an  example  of 
the  mind  as  such  a  means  of  connection  would  be  the  tip- 
ping of  a  man's  hat  to  a  woman.  Here,  a  connection  has 
been  made  through  the  nervous  system,  and  especially  at 
the  synapses  or  points  of  connection  between  nerve-cells  with 
their  extensions,  giving  the  man  the  sight  of  a  woman  whom 
he  knows,  with  the  muscular  response  of  tipping  the  hat. 
Ability  to  control  and  inhibit  this  response  on  seeing  a  woman 
would  come  under  the  same  principle.  One  would  not  do 
this  instinctively;  it  has  been  learned  by  the  man  at  some 
time,  and  has  been  drilled,  or  practised,  until  it  has  become 
habit. 

Instincts  are  also  such  nervous  connections,  inherited, 
and  thus  unlearned.  But  these  may  be  modified  and  re- 
directed. A  child's  natural  inclination,  or  inherited  mental 
connections,  lead  him,  for  example,  to  snatch  candy  from  a 
box  before  him  and  get  it  all  for  himself,  but  he  may  learn 
to  modify  this  connection,  or  the  response  to  it,  by  learning 
to  pass  the  box  first  to  others  before  he  takes  from  it  a 
reasonable  portion  for  himself.  Other  examples  would  be 
the  certain  recall  of  the  correct  spelling  of  the  word  receive 
when  one  is  writing  a  letter,  or  responding  with  the  answer, 
ninety-two  cents,  when  one  is  purchasing  two  pounds  of 
meat  at  forty -six  cents  a  pound.  We  know  that 
throughout  life  individuals  are  confronting  situations  real 
or  imagined  in  school  or  out,  and  we  know  also  that  the 
manner  in  which  they  respond  to  these  situations,  efficiently 
and  socially  or  not,  is  determined  by  the  kind  of  connections 
which  already  exist,  or  can  be  made  on  the  spot  through 
thinking,  by  the  individual  in  question.  Teachers  must 
study  the  situations  in  which  they  place,  children  or  which 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OF   COUNTRY  CHILDREN      37 1 

thfe  latter  are  meeting  outside  the  school,  or  will  meet  later 
in  life,  and  they  must  study  the  responses  in  conduct  which 
they  and  society  wish  to  secure  if  they  are  to  be  successful 
in  making  the  right  nervous  connections. 

Thorndike  on  *' Educational  Achievement" 

From  this  point  of  view  educational  achievement  consists,  not  in 
strengthening  mystical  general  powers  of  the  mind,  but  in  establish- 
ing connections,  binding  appropriate  responses  to  life's  situations, 
"training  the  pupils  to  behavior"  ("behavior"  being  the  name  we 
use  for  "every  possible  sort  of  reaction  on  the  circumstances  into 
which  he  may  find  himself  brought"),  building  up  a  hierarchy  or  habits, 
strengthening  and  weakening  bonds  whereby  one  thing  leads  to  an- 
other in  a  man's  life. 

The  first  suggestion  resulting  is  the  obvious  and  simple  but  profita- 
ble one  that  nothing  is  achieved  by  schools  unless  some  connection 
is  influenced,  that  we  cannot  assume  change  in  any  pupil  unless  bonds 
have  been  made  or  broken  so  as  to  cause  him  to  respond  as  he  did  not 
before.  The  connection  may  be  one  leading  only  to  an  attitude,  say 
of  interest  or  enjoyment.  It  may  be  only  partly  made,  guaranteeing 
the  possibility  of  a  certain  response,  not  its  surety.  It  may  be  hidden, 
showing  itself  only  indirectly,  or  only  after  years,  or  in  some  subtle 
modification  of  intellect  or  character.  It  may  lead  from  some  elusive 
element  or  feature  of  a  situation,  such  as  the  "place-value"  of  a  num- 
ber or  the  subjunctiveness  of  a  subjunctive,  to  some  general  element 
or  feature  of  many  responses,  such  as  open-mindedness  or  cheerful- 
ness, or  readiness  to  do  what  one  accepts  as  right.  But  if  anything  is 
achieved,  some  actual  connection  or  bond  has  been  made,  strengthened, 
weakened,  or  broken.  A  child's  mind  is  never  a  witch's  pot  to  be  set 
in  action  by  educational  incantations.  Its  defects  are  not  curable 
by  faith.  To  discipUne  it  means  to  improve  its  specific  habits.  To 
develop  it  means  to  add  bonds  productive  of  desirable  responses  and 
to  awaken  their  opposites.  Learning  is  connecting.  It  never  be- 
comes so  spiritual,  so  general,  or  so  involved  as  to  evade  expression 
in  terms  of  concrete  couplings  between  real  happenings  to  a  man  and 
real  responses  by  him.  Of  any  educational  achievement  that  does 
evade  such  expression  we  should  be  suspicious.  Probably  its  only 
existence  is  in  our  hopes  and  fears. 

The  teachers,  then,  must  know  just  what  mental  con- 
nections will,  insure  the  conduct  that  will  promote  the  ends 


372  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

of  education,  such  as  health,  economic  and  domestic  effi- 
ciency, citizenship,  etc.  She  must  also  study  the  order  of 
connections  to  be  made  so  that  one  will  lead  naturally  into 
the  other.  In  the  article  quoted  above,  Thorndike  shows 
how  many  of  our  arithmetic  texts  and  other  books  fail  to 
consider  the  actual  life  situations  of  children  and  the  bonds 
which  they  should  make,  and  also  fail  to  consider  the  order 
in  which  one  should  follow  the  other.  Texts  in  arithmetic, 
for  example,  require  a  reading  knowledge  beyond  the  attain- 
ments of  the  children  in  reading,  and  require  a  vocabulary 
which  should  not  be  made  a  part  of  the  child's  connections 
at  the  time.  Four  first  books  in  arithmetic  examined  showed, 
in  the  first  fifty  pages,  for  example,  at  least  four  hundred 
words  for  which  children  were  not  prepared  and  for  which 
they  probably  should  not  be  prepared.  In  his  own  set  of 
arithmetics  he  has  tried  to  make  essential  the  kinds  of  con- 
nections which  will  fit  in  best  with  school  life  and  the  many 
practical  situations  to  be  met  by  all.  Nearing  and  Field's 
^'Community  Civics"  is  another  illustration  of  producing 
connection  in  the  minds  and  bodies  of  children  that  are 
directly  related  to  rural  civic  efficiency.  Not  only  must  a 
proper  selection  of  mental  connections  be  made,  but  the 
proper  correlation  and  organization  of  the  learning  process 
must  follow.  Education  is  becoming  specific  and  practical 
in  the  best  sense.     This  is  made  clearer  in  later  sections. 

I.  Individual  Differences. — While  children  are  sufficiently 
alike  to  be  considered  a  single  species,  yet  mentally  and 
physically  they  are  extremely  variable  in  most  characteris- 
tics. The  individual  differences  in  children  were  largely 
overlooked  in  the  schemes  of  education,  or  schooling,  by 
large  classes  or  groups  devised  by  Lancaster,  Bell,  and 
others,  in  contrast  with  earlier  methods  of  teaching  which 
were  almost  purely  individual,  one  pupil  at  a  time.  But 
mass  instruction  has,  through  its  cheapness,  led  to  the  uni- 
versal and  compulsory  elementary  school  with  its  close  to 
twenty  million  pupils  and  but  a  half  million  teachers,  an 


Pig-club  work  in  Pennsylvania 


Studying  a  milking-machine 


A  lesson  on  tli    ; 

Coming  in  touch  with  real  problems  of  life 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OE   COUNTRY  CHILDREN      373 

average  of  nearly  forty  to  the  teacher.  Now  that  the  public 
has  been  led  to  feel  the  prime  necessity  of  thoroughgoing 
schooling  for  all,  it  is  time  that  we  regain  some  of  the  ad- 
vantages of  recognizing  the  infinite  variety  of  traits  in  in- 
dividuals, instead  of  attempting  to  teach  whole  groups  as 
one  person.  In  many  ways  we  are  discovering  more  fully 
the  extent  and  variety  of  these  individual  differences  and 
the  ways  of  combining  the  advantages  of  individual  and 
group  methods  of  instruction.  The  scientific  knowledge  re- 
lating to  individual  differences  is  of  quite  recent  growth  and 
has  come  mainly  from  psychological  and  pedagogical  in- 
vestigations. Thorndike's  small  volume  on  ''Individuality " 
may  well  be  read  by  all  teachers. 

One  of  the  illustrations  of  scientific  measurement  in  our 
volume  on  ''Teaching  Elementary- School  Subjects"  clearly 
shows  how  the  individual  difference  in  ability  to  solve  sim- 
ple examples  in  arithmetic  of  pupils  in  the  fourth  and  eighth 
grades  widely  overlap,  i.  e.,  pupils  in  the  fourth  grade  do  as 
well  as  many  in  the  eighth  grade  in  these  fundamentals.^ 
If  we  test,  or  measure,  pupils  in  nearly  any  abihty  or  char- 
acteristic the  range  of  variation  will  be  found  immense. 
These  differences  are,  moreover,  highly  specialized.  A 
child  may  be  very  quick  and  accurate  in  multiplication,  for 
example,  and  be  poor  in  subtraction. 

In  recent  years  much  attention  has  been  paid  to  sub- 
normal and  "exceptional"  children  who  are  able  to  do  little 
in  the  average  class  at  school,  and  we  have  special  schools 
or  rooms  for  the  mentally  defective,  the  incorrigible,  the 
pretuberculous  and  anaemic,  the  crippled,  the  bUnd,  the 
deaf,  the  defective  in  speech,  and  others.  Attention  is  at 
last  being  focussed  upon  the  necessity  of  giving  superior 
children  advantages  commensurate  with  their  exceptional 
abilities  instead  of  having  them  drag  along  in  what  has  deri- 
sively been  termed  the  "lock-step"  of  class  or  mass  instruc- 
tion.    "Genius  will  out"  is  but  half  a  truth.     Genius  can 

^"Teaching  Elementary-School  Subjects,"  chap.  XXIII  (Scribners). 


374  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

be  ''born  to  blush  unseen''  or  be  stultified  by  what  Welton 
calls  an  ''education  in  stupidity/'  in  which  the  guidance  of 
the  learning  process  is  so  little  individualized  as  to  be  of 
Httle  value  to  many  of  a  class.  The  ideal  is  to  combine  the 
social  and  economic  advantages  of  class  instruction  with 
teaching  that  will  make  it  possible  for  each  individual  to 
develop  as  nearly  as  possible  at  his  normal  or  maximum  rate 
along  the  lines  in  which  he  most  needs  development.  This 
need  furnishes  one  of  the  chief  arguments  for  placing  chil- 
dren of  the  seventh,  eighth,  and  ninth  grades  in  so-called 
junior  high  schools,  intermediate  schools,  or  regular  high 
schools  with  five  or  six  year  courses.^  Greater  possibilities 
for  individualizing  instruction  are  undoubtedly  thus  pro- 
vided. Courtis  has  shown  that  thirteen  per  cent  of  the  time 
devoted  to  arithmetic  could  be  otherwise  utilized  by  excus- 
ing pupils  from  further  drill  who  had  reached  a  reasonable 
standard  in  class  work. 

Teachers  must  not  let  the  fact  that  they  have  classes 
to  teach  stand  in  the  way  of  providing  in  all  possible  ways 
for  individualizing  the  development  of  the  children  and 
meeting  the  varying  needs  of  each  and  all  within  the  class 
organization.  The  successes  mentioned  above  which  many 
persons,  largely  unversed  in  educational  psychology  and 
principles  of  teaching,  such  as  the  father  of  Karl  Witte, 
have  achieved  in  training  very  young  children  along  many 
lines  so  that  at  an  early  age  they  are  as  far  along,  seemingly 
with  little  or  no  loss,  as  most  children  twice  as  old,  suggest 
many  possibilities  of  educational  progress  through  individu- 
alizing our  teaching  and  helping  each  to  grow  in  the  way  he 
as  an  individual  should — as  rapidly  and  as  economically  as 
he  can.  The  advantages  of  permitting  children  up  to  the 
age  of  twelve  or  so  to  grow  almost  as  young  colts  in  a  field, 
as  little  animals,  as  Rousseau  advocated,  may  well  be  com- 
bined with  the  necessities  and  advantages  of  helping  children 

» See  "  A  Core  Curriculm  for  High  Schools,"  by  the  writer,  in  School  and 
Society  for  May  12,  1917,  and  the  preceding  chapter  on  the  curriculum. 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OF  COUNTRY  CHILDREN      375 

quickly  and  easily  along  their  way  into  the  mysteries  of  the 
complex  civilization  in  which  they  must  so  early  play  an 
active  part.  In  practice,  we  have  many  interesting  experi- 
ments started  in  the  public  schools,  as  described  in  Dewey's 
volumes  entitled  "The  Schools  of  To-Morrow"  and  ''New 
Schools  for  Old  "  (Buttons)  and  recent  government  reports 
such  as  organizing  the  school-day  into  three  parts,  play, 
manual  work,  and  regular  studies,  with  much  freedom 
and  individual  guidance,  dividing  classes  into  slow,  me- 
dium, and  fast  sections,  each  going  at  its  optimum  rate,  ex- 
cusing certain  pupils  from  recitation  and  providing  for  them 
special  supplementary  assignments,  the  Batavia  system 
with  two  teachers  to  the  room,  or  with  supervised  study 
where  a  fourth  to  a  half  of  a  class  period  is  devoted  to  direct- 
ing the  study  of  pupils,  division  of  the  sexes  in  upper  grades 
for  certain  work,  departmental  work  in  upper  or  all  grades, 
each  teacher  teaching  but  one  or  a  few  subjects  to  pupils  of 
several  grades,  school  credit  for  home  work,  dividing  sub- 
ject-matter into  minimal  essentials  for  all  and  optional  work 
for  some,  and  many  others.  The  great  mental,  physical,  and 
social  differences  must  be  taken  into  account  in  any  study 
or  guidance  of  the  learning  process.  Perhaps  the  outcome  in 
the  country  will  be  consolidated  schools  containing  high 
schools  as  in  the  Gary  plan,  with  much  motor  work  and  play 
and  academic  work  correlated  with  these,  and  departmental 
work  in  all  or  most  grades  from  kindergarten  through  high 
school. 

2.  Instinctive  or  Inherited  Mental  Connections. — There  are 
two  chief  classes  of  mental  connections,  inherited  and  ac- 
quired. The  former  are  for  the  most  part  instincts,  and 
the  latter  are  for  the  most  part  habits.  The  tendency  to 
perform  a  certain  act  or  system  of  acts  under  the  stimulus 
of  a  certain  situation,  without  learning  to  do  so,  may  stand 
as  an  explanation  of  instinctive  behavior.  Here  nature  is  the 
schoolmistress  and  makes  the  mental  connection  between 
the  stimulus  and  the  act  without  the  drilling  of  the  school 


376  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

or  home.  Were  we  living  a  simple,  savage  existence,  such 
instinctive  connections  would  largely  suffice,  for  most  of  the 
needs  of  life  would  be  satisfied  without  the  intervention  of 
the  learning  process.  We  should  hardly  need  to  be  taught 
to  get  our  food  and  shelter,  to  play  and  become  strong, 
healthy,  and  joyous,  to  protect  ourselves,  to  mate  and  care 
for  our  offspring,  in  short,  to  meet  most  of  the  fundamental 
needs  of  life  as  do  the  animals,  because  we  are  built  that  way. 
This  original  nature  of  man,  which  Kirkpatrick  and  Thorn- 
dike  have  in  their  books  analyzed  and  described  for  teach- 
ers, has  been  found  to  be  a  tremendously  rich  and  varied 
endowment  of  natural  resources  which  civilized  man  must 
utilize  in  creating  the  superman. 

Were  the  child  to  be  deprived  of  these  inherited,  instinc- 
tive connections  by  some  nervous  paralysis,  he  would  lie 
inactive  and  uninterested  in  anything — a  piece  of  clay  in- 
animate. As  a  city  depending  entirely  on  electricity  lies 
cold  and  dark  after  a  storm  in  which  the  lightning  has  blown 
out  the  fuse  connections  in  every  house,  so  even  more  com- 
pletely, without  the  inherited  synapse  connections  which 
make  the  lines  of  communication  between  sense  organs  and 
muscles,  is  the  individual  without  the  light  of  life.  A  child 
that  will  not  or  cannot  eat,  talk,  walk,  play,  or  respond  by 
manifold  mental  and  physical  activity  to  the  life  stimuli 
about  him  is  cut  off  from  the  possibility  of  becoming  a  hu- 
man personality;  he  cannot  learn. 

There  have  been  two  principal  extreme  points  of  view 
with  respect  to  the  educative  treatment  of  instincts:  first, 
that  the  original  nature  of  human  beings  is  inherently  bad 
and  depraved;  and,  second,  that  it  is  inherently  ideal  and 
good.  Under  the  old  theory,  discipline  and  ascetic  rooting 
out  of  natural  tendencies  was  the  way  of  teaching.  *'Go 
and  see  what  Johnnie  is  doing  and  tell  him  to  don't"  and 
^'Find  out  what  people  naturally  desire  to  do  and  then 
help  them  to  root  out  these  desires"  are  types  of  the  old  in- 
junctions.    "Make  little  men  and  women  of  children  and 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OF   COUNTRY  CHILDREN      377 

force  them  by  military  driving  into  the  desired  type  of 
adults"  has  resulted  in  national  systems  of  education  based 
on  this  policy.  '* Formal  discipline  of  the  mental  faculties" 
and  complete  suppression  of  individuality  in  pupils  (and 
teachers)  have  been  fallacious  results  of  the  doctrine.  A 
world  war  has  been  fought  between  those  holding  to  the 
two  opposing  methods. 

At  the  other  end  of  the  scale  have  been  the  child  "nature 
fakirs,"  idealizing  the  primitive  savage,  "soft  pedagogy," 
and  the  freedom  of  children  to  the  extent  of  permitting  them 
to  follow  every  whim  of  uncontrolled  fancy.  Rousseau  was 
the  leader  of  this  group.  Wordsworth,  also,  in  his  "Inti- 
mations of  Immorality,"  expresses  something  of  the  same 
attitude  toward  the  infant  in  the  lines 

"But  trailing  clouds  of  glory  do  we  come 
From  God,  who  is  our  home: 
Heaven  lies  about  us  in  our  infancy ! 
Shades  of  the  prison-house  begin  to  close 

Upon  the  growing  boy.     *  *  * 
At  length  the  man  perceives  it  die  away, 
And  fade  into  the  light  of  common  day." 

The  common  sense  of  most  people  is  sufficient  to  guard 
against  both  extremes,  although  both  have  had  their  vogue 
and  are  now  discernible  in  many  homes  and  schools.  The 
truth  in  each  extreme  has  been  well  sifted  from  the  untruth 
in  each  by  Dewey  in  his  little  volume  on  "Interest  and 
Effort  in  Education"  and  in  his  "Democracy  and  Educa- 
tion" (chap.  X),  and  Thorndike  has  well  expressed  the  mod- 
ern point  of  view  as  follows: 

Such  problems  as  these  in  mental  mechanics — problems  in  choos- 
ing, ordering,  and  manipulating  the  mind's  connections— are  now  the 
growing  point  of  experimental  education.  By  skilful  analysis  of 
human  learning  into  the  millions  of  elementary  connections  between 
situation  and  response  which  constitute  it  and  by  experimental  study 
of  the  ways  in  which  these  connections  are  best  formed,  preserved, 


378  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

organized,  and  used,  the  psychologist  hopes  to  get  both  comprehension 
and  control  of  the  foundations  of  educational  achievement. 

The  foundations  of  educational  achievement  are  these  connec- 
tions or  bonds  or  habits  of  response,  but  these  habits  themselves  lead 
us  back  farther  to  the  unlearned,  original  capacities  and  tendencies 
of  man.  Human  beings,  as  you  well  know,  are  not  indifferent  clay  to 
be  moulded  at  will  by  the  teacher's  art.  They  are  themselves  active 
forces  to  help  or  hinder.  They  inherit  as  a  human  birthright  instincts 
and  interests  of  which  education  from  the  start  and  throughout  must 
take  account.  Educational  achievement  is  small  or  great  in  propor- 
tion as  it  neglects  these  natural,  untaught  tendencies  in  man,  or  utilizes 
them  to  further  his  ideal  aims.  And  educational  science  needs  as  its 
basal  equipment  an  exact  and  adequate  inventory  of  the  original 
nature  of  man  as  a  species  and  of  the  idiosyncrasies  of  individual  man. 

No  choice  of  habits  of  thought  or  action  to  be  formed  by  schools 
is  sound  which  gives  technic  irrespective  of  needs  felt  by  the  pupil, 
or  adds  knowledge  without  any  motive  for  its  use,  or  tries  to  cultivate 
artificial  virtues  in  disregard  of  the  crude  forms  of  courage,  kindliness, 
zeal,  and  helpfulness  which  nature  already  affords. 

No  arrangement  of  the  mind's  connections  is  economical  which 
fails  to  use  the  inborn  organizing  power  of  curiosity,  the  problem  atti- 
tude, and  the  desire  to  test  and  verify  or  refute  by  eyes  and  hands. 

No  manipulation  of  bonds  in  learning  is  efficient  which  disregards 
the  pupil's  own  sense  of  sociability,  kindness,  and  achievement  dur- 
ing the  learning  process.  The  original  proclivities  of  the  human 
animal  are  as  real  as  its  laws  of  learning  and  condition  these  through- 
out.    Every  habit  is  formed  in  the  service  of  some  instinctive  interest. 

The  inborn  interest  of  man  in  movement,  novelty,  color,  life,  the 
behavior  of  other  human  beings,  sociability,  cheerfulness,  notice, 
approval,  mastery,  and  self -activity,  are  not  ultimate  aims  of  educa- 
tion, nor  is  their  presence  a  guarantee  that  school  work  is  well  directed 
and  efficient.  But  we  double  achievement  if  we  get  them  on  our  side 
and  we  enrich  life  enormously  at  little  cost  if  we  turn  these  fundamental 
passions  into  line  with  higher  nature  and  the  common  good. 

I  hold  no  brief  in  favor  of  avoiding  in  schools  anything  necessary 
for  human  welfare,  either  because  it  is  hard  or  because  it  is  disliked. 
I  find  many  of  the  tendencies  born  in  man  to  be  archaic,  useless,  im- 
moral, adapted  to  such  a  life  as  man  lived  in  the  woods  a  hundred 
thousand  years  ago,  when  affection  had  not  spread  beyond  the  family, 
or  justice  beyond  the  tribe,  or  science  beyond  the  needs  of  to-morrow, 
and  when  truth  was  only  the  undisputed,  and  goodness  only  the  un- 
rebuked.  That  the  natural  is  the  good  is  a  superstition  which  psy- 
chology cannot  tolerate.    Still  less,  however,  can  psychology  tolerate 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OF   COUNTRY  CHILDREN      379 

the  superstition  that  there  can  be  any  other  foundation  for  educa- 
tional achievement  other  than  the  best  that  human  nature  itself  affords. 
Truth  is  only  what  the  best  in  human  nature  accepts;  goodness  is 
only  what  the  best  human  nature  craves.  We  mean  by  the  rational, 
ideal,  and  impersonal  aims  of  education,  only  the  nobler  inborn  human 
interests  purified  of  their  crude  accompaniments  and  broadened  to 
harmonize  with  the  common  good.  We  must  not  find  too  much  fault 
with  human  nature;  for  ultimately  it  is  all  we  have.  Its  best  ele- 
ments are  the  best  the  world  has  or  ever  will  have. 

In  short,  the  various  instinctive  tendencies  of  children 
to  respond  in  various  ways  to  life  situations  are  to  be  studied 
and  utilized,  guided  and  directed  toward  social  efficiency, 
as  natural  resources,  like  a  great  gorge  of  running  water 
which  can  be  controlled  and  guided  into  turning  the  wheels 
of  industry,  lighting  towns  miles  away,  and  irrigating  vast 
stretches  of  waste  land.  The  playground  movement,  for 
example,  which,  since  1907,  has  spread  over  this  country 
like  fire  in  prairie-grass,  has  released  milHons  of  horse-powers 
of  energy  in  children,  which  previously  would  have  been 
largely  misdirected  and  wasted,  and  has  diverted  them  into 
the  most  educative  activities  contributing  to  health,  grace, 
ability,  knowledge  and  training  in  getting  along  well  with 
one's  fellows,  leadership,  practical  morals,  right  use  of  lei- 
sure, constructive  and  manual- training  activities — affecting 
directly  in  some  measure  most  or  all  of  the  ends  of  educa- 
tion.   As  Bagley  says: 

The  task  of  education  with  reference  to  the  instincts  is  three- 
fold: (i)  Certain  instinctive  controls  must  be  ^^ sublimated" ;  that  is, 
the  energy  that  they  release  must  be  directed  to  ends  other  than  those 
indicated  by  the  primitive  instincts  themselves.  The  few  but  trouble- 
some unsocial  or  antisocial  impulses  are  in  this  class — the  impulse 
to  appropriate  what  pleases  one;  the  impulse  to  inflict  bodily  injury 
upon  those  against  whom  the  feeling  of  resentment  has  been  aroused; 
the  impulse  to  follow  the  strongest  external  stimulus  regardless  of  its 
remote  bearing  upon  the  remote  ends  that  one  seeks  to  attain;  the 
impulse  to  seek  change  and  variety;  and,  in  the  ever-lengthening 
period  that  elapses  between  physiological  and  economic  maturity,  the 
imperious  sex  and  parental  instincts. 


380  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

(2)  In  the  second  place,  certain  instincts  must  be  confirmed  and 
given  the  sanction  of  repeated  experience.  Chief  among  these  are 
the  comparatively  weak  ipstincts  of  co-operation  and  sacrifice. 

(3)  Finally,  certain  instincts  form  the  basis  of  incentives  or  natural 
interests  which  may  be  directed  toward  the  acquisition  of  controls 
that  may  be  quite  unrelated  to  the  instincts  employed  as  means. 
Among  these  are  the  instinct  of  emulation,  the  "property"  instinct, 
and  especially  the  adaptive  instincts — play,  curiosity,  imitation,  and 
repetition. 

The  chief  warning  vi^hich  teachers  must  regard  in  utilizing 
instincts  is  probably  along  the  line  of  the  place  of  interest 
in  teaching.  Dewey,  the  great  modern  exponent  of  educa- 
tion by  natural  development,  warns  teachers  again  and 
again  to  avoid  the  pitfalls  of  divorcing  interest  and  effort 
by  making  the  work  of  education  so  soft  and  easy  as  to 
encourage  mental  laziness,  physical  flabbiness,  and  inability 
to  do  anything  that  needs  to  be  done  if  it  does  not  strongly 
appeal  to  the  child  as  temporarily  interesting.  The  danger 
lies  in  encouraging  the  attitude  which  waits  for  work  that 
attracts,  and  discourages  the  appropriate  and  only  rational 
attitude  toward  work — namely,  putting  forth  the  effort  to 
make  the  work  attractive.  It  makes  one  the  slave  of  one's 
desires  and  enthusiasms  rather  than  their  master.  Teachers 
should  read  also  the  chapter  on  Discipline  and  the  Doc- 
trine of  Interest  in  his  volume  on  **  School  Discipline," 
by  Professor  Bagley,  who  is  the  chief  exponent  in  this 
country  of  the  *' Gospel  of  Work"  in  education. 

^^ Motivation  of  School  Work^'  has  been  a  popular  cry  in 
many  schools  in  the  last  few  years.  Children  have  a  right 
to  live  as  naturally  now  as  they  will  when  they  grow  up — 
to  understand  why  they  do  this  and  that,  and  to  have 
some  legitimate  desire  which  they  themselves  feel  as  a 
prompting  to  the  work.  Teachers  have  gained  excellent 
results  with  delight  to  the  children  by  this  method.  In- 
stead of  reading  aloud  with  no  one  to  learn  or  to  get  thought 
from  the  reading,  no  audience  situation,  children  are  taught 
to  face  the  class  and  read  to  them — they  with  their  books 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OE  COUNTRY  CHILDREN      38 1 

closed.  More  naturally  still,  the  child  reads  matter  un- 
known and  interesting  to  his  class  in  such  a  way  as  to  fur- 
nish them  delight.  The  children  write,  not  so  many  pages 
on  duty,  patience,  etc.,  as  in  days  gone  by,  but  real  letters 
to  children  absent  from  school  or  others  in  schools  far  away, 
to  the  school  directors  words  of  appreciation  for  improv- 
ing their  playground  by  apparatus,  trees,  or  grading,  and 
so  on.^  The  play  and  competitive  instincts  are  used  to 
provide  motives  for  participating  vigorously  in  the  drill  of 
arithmetic  and  spelling  by  holding  ciphering  and  spelling 
matches.  In  the  Gary,  the  Fairhope,  the  Speyer,  the  Francis 
Parker,  and  other  such  schools  described  by  Dewey  in  his 
*' Schools  of  To-Morrow,"  children  learn  important  lessons 
closely  related  to  the  great  aims  of  education  by  natural 
constructive  activities  in  the  shops,  laboratories,  on  the 
playgrounds,  on  excursions,  and  everywhere.  Those  newer 
rural-school  movements  which  base  the  learning  process 
more  fundamentally  on  the  natural  instincts  of  childhood 
are  showing  us  that  the  gospel  of  interest  and  happiness 
can  be  lived  along  with  the  gospel  of  work  and  duty.  In- 
terest and  effort  can  be  harmonized.  The  child  can  learn  to 
do  by  doing.  Thus  the  farm  at  the  school  and  home  proj- 
ect work,  agricultural,  domestic,  and  closely  related  train- 
ing, fit  our  modern  theories  of  child  psychology  and  hygiene. 
4.  Self- Activity. — A  fourth  great  principle  of  the  learn- 
ing process  is  that  of  self-activity.  The  learning  process 
is,  when  operating  at  all,  one  of  self-activity.  "Teaching 
is  but  providing  situations  for  educative  self-activity," 
said  Francis  Parker.  ''You  may  lead  a  horse  to  water  but 
you  can't  make  it  drink  "  and  "learning  by  doing''  are  old 
sayings.  The  Bible  says:  "Ye  must  be  doers  of  the  deed 
if  ye  would  understand  the  doctrine."  Unless  we  get  the 
right  responses  from  children,  our  incentives,  stimuli,  or 

1  Wilson's  "Motivation  of  School  Work,"  chaps.  V  and  VI.  Isn't  the 
minimal  essential  of  composition  the  art  of  letter-writing  ?  What  else  do  most 
people  write  in  this  world? 


382  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

situations  are  not  educative.  "Students  are  educated  by 
their  own  mental  responses,  not  by  the  stimuli  or  influ- 
ences provided  by  the  teacher.  The  latter  are  influential  in 
determining  the  individual's  character  only  through  the 
responses  they  arouse,"  says  Professor  Chester  Parker. 
Children  can  learn  both  by  direct  and  by  communicated 
experience,  more  from  the  former  than  the  latter,  but  the 
test  is  always  the  actual  experience  and  the  reaction  to  it. 
Since  .^the  time  of  Rousseau  and  Froebel  and  especially 
since  modern  educational  psychology  has  begun  contribut- 
ing to  educational  science,  in  the  last  few  years,  the  impor- 
tance of  this  law  of  self-activity  has  gradually  been  increas- 
ing. Children  learn  to  appear  attentive,  docile,  and  engag- 
ing in  the  learning  process  when  their  minds  are  "o'er  the 
hills  and  far  away."  Day-dreaming  and  mental  laziness  are 
fostered  by  methods  that  do  not  provide  for  energetic  self- 
activity  on  the  part  of  the  pupils.  The  ideal  is  to  get  chil- 
dren as  happily,  energetically,  and  persistently  engaged  at 
the  most  educative  activity  for  them  all  the  time  in  the  school 
as  they  engage  in  their  games  of  baseball,  marbles,  and  hide- 
and-seek  outside.  Too  often  our  methods  foster  the  sit- 
ting-on-the-bleachers-while-the-game-goes-on  habit.  We 
must  get  educative  activity  that  is  really  educative  and  that 
is  adapted  to  the  age  and  needs  of  the  individual  pupils  and 
community  and  then  get  all  into  this  activity  all  the  time, 
whether  it  be  making  a  chair  or  repairing  a  shoe  in  manual 
training,  solving  real  problems  in  arithmetic,  engaging  in 
play  and  co-operative  group  games  on  the  playground,  or 
simply  lying  at  rest  on  the  reclining  chairs  or  mats  of  the 
open-air  school,  or  in  the  ordinary  seats  of  the  classroom. 
A  hundred-per-cent  teacher  is  one  who  can  get  all  pupils  thus 
engaged  all  the  time.  A  thirty-per-cent  teacher  is  one  who 
can  get  all  thus  engaged  thirty  per  cent  of  the  time.  Mere 
self-activity,  however,  is  not  the  aim,  although  this  seems  to 
be  the  only  aim  of  much  of  the  so-called  busy  work.  "  Noth- 
ing is  so  terrible  as  activity  without  method."     The  most 


LEARNING  PROCESSES  OF  COUNTRY  CHILDREN      383 

useful,  educative,  self-activity  guided  by  social  purpose  is 
our  goal. 

5.  Habit-Building. — The  learning  process  consists  prin- 
cipally of  the  formation  of  habits.  The  millions  of  habits 
which  should  be  formed  by  teaching  can  be  named  and  classi- 
fied as  Bagley  has  listed  and  classified  the  ideals  which 
should  be  made  a  part  of  each  child's  make-up  in  varying 
propositions  according  to  his  needs.  The  home  has  a  very 
large  part  to  play  in  this  process  from  the  earliest  weeks  of 
the  child's  Hfe  in  creating  the  habits  of  feeding,  sleeping, 
and  playing  at  regular  hours,  such  habits  as  the  "knife- 
hand,"  the  "fork-hand,"  the  "spoon-hand,"  and  the  hun- 
dreds of  other  habits  of  the  table,  for  example,  the 
thousands  of  habits  in  the  use  of  language,  the  habits 
connected  with  putting  on  and  taking  off  clothing,  and  the 
habits  of  behavior  in  the  house  for  providing  the  greatest 
satisfaction  to  the  individual  and  least  injury  and  greatest 
good  to  the  other  members  of  the  home.  Each  one  of  these 
is  a  mental  connection  or  system  of  connections  between  a 
situation  and  a  form  of  behavior  which  is,  through  the  learn- 
ing process,  estabhshed  in  the  nervous  system.  James  and 
other  psychologists  have  said  that  999/1000  of  our  daily 
activity  is  made  up  of  habits,  and  this  is  literally  true. 

A  process  is  educative  while  it  is  being  learned,  i.  e., 
being  made  habit.  When  habit  breaks  down  or  we  find 
we  have  no  habits  to  fit  the  new  and  strange  situation, 
then  thinking,  with  its  active  attention,  arises  to  build  the 
new  connection  systems.  When  we  describe  the  ideal  man 
or  woman  we  tell  what  this  individual  habitually  does  in 
various  given  situations.  A  great  law  of  learning  habits 
is  that  of  vigorous  attentive  repetition.  Fortunately,  chil- 
dren have  an  instinct  for  repetition  which  helps  them  to 
take  great  pleasure  in  repeating  many  acts  until  they  have 
been  made  established  mental  connections,  or  habits.  A 
child  will  fill  a  cup  with  sand  and  pour  it  out  again  by  the 
half-hour,  or  will  similarly  button  and  unbutton  its  shoes, 


384  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

or  do  anything,  practically,  which  instinct  or  acquired  in- 
terest leads  it  to  do  until  the  act  has  been  fairly  well  or 
completely  learned.  Pupils  need  skilful  guidance,  however, 
in  getting  them  to  go  through  the  drill  for  which  they  do 
not  have  such  instinctive  promptings,  such  as  the  forty- 
five  addition  and  forty-five  multiplication  facts,  for  example, 
or  the  habit  of  washing  their  hands  before  coming  to  the 
table.  Here  is  where  motivation  and  real-life  situations 
play  their  part  in  stimulating  the  necessary  repetition  and 
attention.  Usually  the  principles  of  habituation  are  given 
as  focalization,  repetition,  permitting  no  exceptions,  and 
providing  for  long-continued  use  of  the  needed  activity. 
They  will  be  discussed  and  applied  in  the  following  chapter. 

Formal  discipline  is  a  doctrine  closely  related  to  the 
habit-forming  process  which  has  had  a  great  and  largely 
injurious  effect  upon  education.  The  thought  has  been  that 
if  one  drills  himself  in  one  Hne  of  activity  he  will  develop 
a  general  power  of  this  type,  i.  e.,  if  one  drills  himself  in 
reasoning  out  the  answers  to  puzzles  and  algebraic  problems, 
that  he  thereby  gains  more  than  the  ability  to  solve  such 
puzzles  and  such  problems,  that  he  gains  a  general  power 
of  reasoning  in  all  fields  and  with  any  material.  *'If  he  per- 
sistently works  hard  at  the  drudgery  of  formal  grammar 
he  will  gain  the  power  to  work  hard  at  any  line  of  work." 
*'If  he  memorizes  all  the  words  in  the  spelling-book,  regard- 
less of  his  need  for  ability  to  spell  them  all  or  a  twentieth  of 
them  in  letter-writing,  he  will  by  this  exercise  strengthen 
his  memory  for  any  or  all  other  things."  ^'In  the  primary 
grades  we  are  to  develop  powers  of  observation,  perception, 
concentration,  reasoning,  and  attention."  These  are  such 
expressions  as  we  have  probably  all  heard  supervisors  or 
others  say  in  the  past. 

The  truth  probably  is  that  in  memorizing  the  spelling 
of  words  we  gain  ability  to  spell  the  words  which  we  mem- 
orize, and  that  our  memory  for  the  number  of  days  in  a 
month,  for  the  facts  of  arithmetic,  and  for  other  matter 


LEARNING  PROCESSES  OF  COUNTRY  CHILDREN     385 

has  not  been  especially  helped.  When  we  come  to  attack 
the  memorization  of  these  we  go  through  about  the  same 
amount  of  memory  activity  as  if  we  had  not  previously 
memorized.  There  is  a  certain  identity  of  processes  in  many 
similar  lines  of  mental  work;  and  certain  notions  of  how  to 
do  a  thing  and  certain  ideals  of  what  to  do  and  how  to  do 
it  arise  in  many  persons'  minds  in  transferring  from  one  to 
another;  we  may  have  "general  discipline''  when  we  have 
not  formal  discipline;  we  do  get  certain  attitudes  of  mind, 
a  certain  readiness  or  unreadiness  to  cope  with  situations, 
a  certain  way  of  responding,  and  a  certain  character,  in 
short. ^  But  a  great  wrong  has  been  done  entire  nations 
of  individuals  through  the  extreme  applications  of  this 
theory.  Educators  and  the  public  have  thought  it  possible 
to  work  out  certain  formal  mental  and  physical  gymnastics 
which  could  be  drilled  into  pupils  in  some  sequestered  spot, 
entirely  apart  from  life  and  its  manifold  situations,  and 
thus  give  general  mental  ability,  the  millions  of  separate 
habits  in  response  to  given  and  unique  life  situations  which, 
if  the  individual  is  to  gain  habits  fitting  him  for  this  world, 
can  be  found  nowhere  except  in  the  life  of  the  world  itself. 
The  parts  of  formal  grammar  which  do  not  function  in  im- 
proving children's  speech,  obsolete  and  never-used  phases 
of  arithmetic,  algebra,  geometry,  Latin,  Greek,  formal 
technical  science,  deductive  logic,  modern  languages  other 
than  English,  and  many  other  subjects  have  been  put  in 
or  kept  in  courses  of  study  largely  regardless  of  any  direct 
and  plain  relation  which  they  bear  to  any  of  the  large  aims 
of  education,  all  because  of  the  superstitious  beHef  that 
these  in  some  mysterious  manner  "disciplined,"  "trained," 
"cultivated"  the  mind,  "developed  the  mental  faculties," 
and  "made  keen  the  understanding." 

This  danger  is  so  great  that  the  wise  teacher  will  limit 
her  teaching,  not  merely  to  what  is  "practical"  in  the 
narrow  sense  of  having  an  easily  observable  relation  to 

^Yocum,  "Culture,  Discipline,  and  Democracy,"  chaps.  II  and  III, 


386  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

bread-and-butter  aims,  the  making  of  a  living,  but  prac- 
tical in  the  sense  that  the  habits  she  cultivates  have  a  plain 
and  observable  relation  to  all  the  great  aims  of  education, 
such  as  health,  right  use  of  leisure,  citizenship,  moral  effi- 
ciency, etc.,  with  the  foundation  habits,  carefully  selected, 
that  give  one  ability  to  communicate  with  one's  fellows,  to 
meet  the  few  and  simple  number  relations  of  Hfe,  to  get 
along  well  socially  with  one's  neighbors,  habits  of  harmless 
enjoyment,  etc.  We  have  attempted  educational  systems 
here  and  abroad  on  false  hypotheses  held  as  dogmas  and 
have  failed  in  educating  our  publics;  let  us  to-day  analyze 
our  life  and  teaching  situations  until  we  are  able  to  say 
definitely  that  the  habits  we  inculcate  are  surely  needed  by 
the  child  and  society  in  definite  and  clearly  perceived  situa- 
tions. We  need  fewer  theoretical  bubbles  and  more  of  sci- 
entific brass  tacks  in  our  great  business  of  nation  forming.^ 
The  social  survey  of  the  community  and  state  gives  us  our 
social  aims  and  needs;  scientific  study  of  children  gives  us 
.knowledge  of  how  to  help  them  to  form  necessary  life  habits. 
5.  Knowledge,  habits,  ideals,  and  appreciations  are  four 
of  the  principal  psychological  factors  in  learning.  By 
knowledge  we  usually  mean  all  four — everything  one  gets 
by  the  learning  process.  But  most  habits  are  easily  dis- 
tinguished from  knowledge,  or  information,  and  ideals  from 
either.  The  laws  for  learning,  or  gaining  knowledge  (ideas, 
facts,  information,  principles),  are  the  laws  principally  of 
memory  and  the  simple  associations  of  meanings  or  ideas 
with  symbols.  What  knowledge  is  of  most  worth  has  been 
discussed  in  previous  chapters.  How  the  child  gains  knowl- 
edge, communicated  or  vicarious  experience,  is  our  present 
problem.  Facts  get  into  the  mind  by  simple  sensing,  per- 
ceiving,   and   interpreting.     The   child  gains  the  meaning 

^  The  aim  of  education  is  growth  in  social  efl&ciency,  the  factors  of  which 
are:  (i)  vital,  (2)  vocational,  (3)  avocational,  (4)  civic,  and  (s)  moral  efficiency. 
We  repeat  this  in  order  that  it  may  become  fixed.  The  student  should  mem- 
orize the  factors  in  the  order  here  given. 


LEARNING  PROCESSES  OF  COUNTRY  CHILDREN      387 

of  the  word  dog  and  the  word  pat  by  seeing  and  perform- 
ing the  action  in  close  association  with  hearing  the  words 
naming  the  act.  By  repetition,  the  mental  connection  be- 
tween the  word  and  the  action  are  made  habit,  here  termed 
memory.  The  command,  **Go,  pat  the  dog,"  is  similarly 
learned  by  simple  mental  association.  Gradually,  as  the 
child  grows  older,  this  command  may  be  so  fixed  by  drill 
and  by  vividness,  including  the  awakening  of  desire  and 
interest  or  fear  of  punishment  as  incentives,  that,  inhibit- 
ing all  calls  on  his  attention  by  objects  and  activities  along 
the  way,  he  may  walk  some  distance  holding  in  memory 
the  command,  and  at  the  end  of  the  little  journey  pat  the 
dog  as  commanded.  This  is  connection-forming  involving 
ideas,  a  higher  type  than  the  simple  connections  of  the 
animal  type  such  as  that  of  the  child  learning  to  button  his 
shoes. 

We  have  not  attempted  to  discuss  all  types  of  learning 
separately.  Parker  distinguishes  five  types:  (i)  gaining 
motor  habits  or  skill,  (2)  associating  symbols  and  meanings, 
(3)  gaining  power  in  reflective  thinking,  (4)  gaining  habits 
of  harmless  enjoyment,  (5)  gaining  skill  in  expression. 

The  hierarchy  of  mental  connections  which  can  be  made 
are  given  in  the  next  article.  Thorndike  distinguishes  four 
types  of  connection-forming  in  learning:  first,  that  of  the 
simple  animal  type  as  when  a  baby  learns  to  beat  a  drum 
with  no  thought  of  the  process;  second,  that  involving  ideas, 
as  when  an  older  child  learns  to  think  of  candy  on  hearing 
the  word,  or  to  say  candy  on  thinking  the  idea;  third, 
analysis  or  abstraction,  as  when  the  child  learns  to  pick  out 
its  mother's  voice  in  the  babel  of  sounds  of  a  roomful  of 
company;  and  fourth,  selective  thinking  or  reasoning,  as 
when  a  person  learns  to  meet  a  given  new  problem  or  situa- 
tion by  testing  out  various  methods  of  solving  it  which  occur 
to  him. 

The  second  and  first  have  been  discussed;  the  third  and 
fourth  will  be  treated  in  the  following  chapter.     Under  the 


388  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

head  of  habit-formation  and  the  recitation  lesson  we  shall 
treat  further  of  the  type  of  learning  in  which  ideas  are 
used.  The  learning  of  ideals,  attitudes,  and  appreciations 
will  also  be  treated  under  topics  of  the  teaching  process. 
Teaching  is  but  the  supervision  of  the  learning  process,  and 
any  discussion  of  the  one  process  involves  discussion  of  the 
other.  In  his  "Psychology  of  the  Common  Branches,'' 
Professor  Freeman  has  discussed  the  learning  process  in 
direct  connection  with  the  elementary-school  subjects.  In 
his  "How  Children  Learn,"  he  has  covered  the  ground  of 
this  chapter  and  more.  In  his  volume  on  "The  Learning 
Process,"  Professor  Colvin  has  treated  the  more  general 
aspects  as  has  Thorndike  in  his  "Educational  Psychology." 
Each  teacher  can  and  must  be  a  first-hand  student  of  this 
most  interesting  and  important  process  in  the  world.  It  is 
said  that  Germany  spent  a  hundred  million  dollars  in  pub- 
licity work  that  changed  the  minds  of  the  Russians  and  led 
to  easy  victory.  The  science  of  mind-building  in  children 
and  adults  has  all  the  fascination  of  invention  and  discovery. 

SUMMARY 

1.  Knowledge  of  the  nature  of  children  and  the  learning  process  is 

extremely  important  and  rapidly  increasing. 

2.  Learning  is  largely  physical  and  it  has  a  health  and  development 

basis. 

3.  The  physical  basis  of  learning  has  been  sadly  overlooked  and  from 

one-third  to  two-thirds  of  American  children  to-day  are  seriously 
hindered  in  their  growth,  both  mental  and  physical,  by  serious 
ailments  and  defects.  Teachers  must  learn  to  help  discover, 
cure,  and  prevent  such  hindrances  to  the  learning  process. 

4.  The  learning  process  is  fundamentally  one  of  adjusting  oneself 

mentally  and  physically  to  life's  needs  and  situations. 

5.  It  is  always  a  mental  and  physical  process  when  at  its  best.     We 

learn  to  meet  life's  needs  and  situations  by  meeting  them. 
Guidance,  reflection,  and  study  of  the  situations  and  conditions 
help  to  economize  and  hasten  the  process. 

6.  The  great  individual  differences  in  the  nature  and  in  the  life  needs 

of  individuals  must  always  be  studied  and  considered. 


LEARNING  PROCESSES   OF  COUNTRY  CHILDREN      389 

7.  Instincts,  natural  impulses,  and  interests  are  the  natural  resources 

of  education.  These  inherited  mental  connections  keep  the 
child  alive  and  ready  to  be  doing  things  to  learn.  Put  children 
in  the  best  possible  environment  and  help  them  to  learn  to 
respond  to  it  socially. 

8.  Children  learn  best  by  meeting  situations  themselves  through 

their  own  self-activity.  Most  teachers  err  in  doing  things  for 
children  and  telling  them  what  they  think  they  should  know. 
Education  is  a  constant  self-active  reconstruction  of  experience 
in  the  direction  of  a  socialized,  cultured,  efficient  individual. 

9.  Habit  and  thinking  are  two  important  types  of  adjustment  or 

mental  connection.     When  habit  breaks  down,  thinking  arises. 

10.  The  old  faculty  psychology  has  gone,  but  the  theory  of  formal 

discipline  lingers.  The  wise  teacher  learns  to  guide  activity 
toward  more  realizable  ends  than  a  training  of  "the  reason," 
''memory,"  will-power,  concentration,  imagination,  etc. 

11.  Knowledge  gained  by  mere  memory  without  reference  to  doing 

something,  guiding  conduct,  meeting  a  situation,  is  not  power. 


PROBLEMS   IN  APPLICATION 

1.  Make  a  list  of  the  principal  mistakes  made  in  handling  pupils. 

2.  What  facts  and  principles  of  child  nature  and  growth  in  social 

efficiency  are  overlooked  by  those  making  these  errors? 

3.  Is  the  fact  that  a  large  proportion  of  boys  and  girls  desire  to 

"leave  the  farm  and  go  to  the  city  to  live"  due  to  poor  educa- 
tion in  the  home  or  in  the  school,  or  is  it  desirable  or  inevitable  ? 

4.  What  methods  would  you  suggest  for  insuring  that  pupils  learned 

how  to  write  effective  letters  to  mail-order  houses  with  reason- 
able legibility  and  correctness  of  spelling  and  that  they  would 
not  find  letter-writing  so  repugnant  in  adult  life  that  they  would 
fail  to  make  use  of  it  when  desirable  for  communication? 

5.  What  great  principles  of  method  are  followed  in  your  statement  of 

ways  and  means? 

6.  Read  Strayer  and  Norsworthy's  "How  to  Teach"   as  soon  as 

possible  in  this  connection.  The  volume  is  really  one  on  child 
psychology  and  methods  of  learning. 

7.  What  phases  of  method  do  farmers  ordinarily  stress  in  speaking 

of  teaching?    What  ones  do  they  usually  overlook? 

8.  What  effect  has  the  transportation  of  pupils  to  a  consolidated 

school  on  their  opportunity  to  study? 

9.  Read  the  chapters  relating  to  rural-school  hygiene  in  the  writer's 

volume  on  "Educational  Hygiene,"  or  the  volume  on  "Rural 


390  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

School  Hygiene,"  as  it  relates  to  the  health  and  physical  devel- 
opment of  country  children, 
lo.  Why  is  habit  so  important  in  promoting  health  in  pupils  and  the 
community  ?  Do  the  sanitary  features  of  a  consolidated  school 
favor  the  development  of  hygienic  habits?  What  is  the  rela- 
tion of  indoor  flush-toilets  at  consolidated  schools  to  the  incul- 
cation of  anti-typhoid  habits  of  cleanliness? 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Bachman — "Principles  of  Elementary  Education."    D.  C.  Heath 

&Co. 

2.  Bagley — "Educational  Values."    The  Macmillan  Co. 
3. "School  Discipline."     The  Macmillan  Co. 

4.  Colvin — "The  Learning  Process."    The  Macmillan  Co. 

5.  Colvin  &  Bagley — "Human  Behavior."     The  Macmillan  Co. 

6.  Dewey — "Democracy  and  Education."    The  Macmillan  Co. 

7.  "Interest  and  Effort."     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

8.  "The  Schools  of  To-Morrow."    E.  P.  Dutton  &  Co. 

9.  Freeman — "The  Psychology  of  the  Common  Branches."     Hough- 

ton Mifflin  Co. 

10.  "How  Children  Learn."     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

11.  Hoag  and  Terman — "Health  Work  in  the  Schools."     Houghton 

Mifflin  Co. 

12.  Kirkpatrick — "Fundamentals   of   Child   Study."    The   Macmil- 

lan Co. 

13.  Klapper — "Principles  of  Educational  Practice."    D.  Appleton  & 

Co. 

14.  Parker — "Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  Schools."     Ginn  &  Co. 

15.  Rapeer — "Educational  Hygiene."     Chas.  Scribner's  Sons. 

16.  "Teaching  Elementary  School  Subjects."    Chas.  Scribner's 

Sons. 

17.  Sandiford — "The  Mental  and  Physical  Life  of  School  Children." 

Longmans,  Green  &  Co. 

18.  Thorndike — "Foundations  of  Educational  Achievement  in  1914." 

Proceedings  of  the  National  Education  Association  and  the 
Educational  Review  for  December,  1914. 

19.  "Individuahty."     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

20.  "Principles  of  Teaching."     Seller  Co. 

21.  "Original  Nature  of  Man."     Teachers  College,  Columbia 

University. 

22.  "The  Psychology  of  Learning."    Teachers  College,  Colum- 
bia University. 


LEARNING   PROCESSES   OF   COUNTRY   CHILDREN      39 1 

23.  Wilson — "Motivation    of    the    Elementary    School    Subjects." 

Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

24.  Strayer  and  Norsworthy — "How  to  Teach."    The  Macmillan  Co. 

25.  Vogt— "Rural  Sociology."    D.  Appleton  &  Co. 

26.  McKeever's  books  on  farm  boys  and  girls. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  TEACHING  PROCESS   IN  THE   CONSOLIDATED 

SCHOOL 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  advantage  has  the  country  teacher  using  a  text  like  Field 

and  Nearing's  "Community   Civics"  (Ginn)  over  the  teacher 
using  the  ordinary  old-type  texts? 

2.  Make  a  list  of  some  of  the  important  good  points  of  the  teaching 

you  have  observed  as  a  pupil  and  student. 

3.  Could  children  be  successfully  taught  how  to  invent?     Can  in- 

vention and  originality  of  thinking  be  developed?    How? 

4.  What  are  the  possible  advances  in  teaching  which  may  be  expected 

from  such  experimental  schools  as  the  Lincoln,  in  New  York 
City,  under  the  General  Education  Board? 

5.  What  are  some  of  the  chief  sources  of  waste  of  time  in  teaching? 

6.  What  books  on  methods  of  teaching  have  you  seen  or  read?    Do 

they  compare  well  with  text-books  on  method  for  physicians  and 
lawyers  ? 

I.    The  Teaching  Situation 

The  Child,  the  School,  and  Society. — The  public-school 
teacher  of  our  democracy  should  be  thoroughly  equipped 
with  experience  relating  to  the  nature  of  children  and  to 
the  nature  of  present-day  American  and  especially  rural 
society.  He  will  realize  that  his  pupils  have  both  private 
and  public  functions,  and  that  the  work  which  they  do  in 
the  world,  whether  specifically  private  or  public,  should  be 
social  service — honest  and  efficient  contribution  to  the  wel- 
fare of  society.  The  principal  positive  and  negative  prob- 
lems of  the  individual  and  of  society  will  be  his  problems. 
The  failure  of  democracy  in  his  own  community  and  state, 
as  shown  in  the  forms  of  poverty,  disease, .  crime,  social  in- 

392 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  393 

justice,  industrial  inefficiency,  lack  of  desirable  leisure, 
appreciation,  culture  and  avocations,  etc.,  and  the  needs 
of  individuals,  community,  and  state  in  the  way  of  positive 
conduct-controls  that  will  promote  the  values  of  health, 
morality,  and  general  social  efficiency  necessary  to  the  pro- 
motion of  universal  happiness  and  self-realization — these 
he  understands,  is  keenly  responsive  to,  and  is  daily  grow- 
ing in  efficiency  to  meet  as  a  servant  of  the  public  good. 

Devine  has  offered  some  valuable  suggestions  for  im- 
proving the  social  function  of  the  schools  in  the  proceedings 
of  the  1 9 14  National  Education  Association.  He  shows 
the  serious  limitations  under  which  most  of  us  as  teachers 
work,  and  how  easily  we  become  pedantic  when  not  con- 
versant with  social  needs  and  not  continually  on  the  alert 
to  adapt  means  to  social  ends.  It  is  only  by  the  aid  of  more 
socialized  teachers,  curricula,  and  a  more  vital  connection 
with  social  needs  and  conditions  that  we  can  perform  the 
service  for  which  we  are  employed.  The  ideal  rural  teacher 
is  thoroughly  conversant  with  rural  needs  and  conditions 
by  direct  experience  and  reading,  and  is  also  acquainted 
with  the  problems  of  cities  and  the  world  in  general.  Rural 
sociology,  economics,  and  civics  will  be  a  large  part  of  his 
academic  knowledge.  The  natural  sciences  and  the  social 
sciences  directly  related  to  rural  life  will  displace  much  of 
his  language  and  mathematical  studies. 

We  fail  also  when  we  do  not  know  children  thoroughly, 
not  only  in  a  personal  but  in  a  scientific  manner.  Rous- 
seau may  have  overstated  it  when  he  said  that  whenever 
he  was  in  doubt  as  to  educational  procedure  the  teacher 
should  study  his  pupils  in  order  to  learn  the  answer.  But 
there  is  much  of  truth  in  the  proposition.  One  may  have 
profound  insight  into  modern  rural  social  conditions  and 
problems,  and  the  relation  of  his  particular  pupils  to  these 
problems,  but  unless  he  knows  the  nature  of  childhood  and 
the  learning  process  he  will  make  a  very  common  and  la- 
mentable failure  when  he  proceeds  to  teach.    The  technic 


394  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

of  teaching  stands  on  two  legs,  the  nature  of  society  and  the 
nature  of  children. 

The  most  important  reform  and  the  most  fruitful  de- 
velopment toward  teaching  efficiency  since  the  time  of  Rous- 
seau has  been  that  of  sympathetic  and  scientific  child-study. 
The  reaction  against  the  demands  of  society  and  the  result- 
ing specializing  of  all  emphasis  on  the  child  went  too  far 
in  the  direction  of  individualism,  perhaps,  but  the  focus  of 
attention  of  several  generations  on  the  child  as  the  centre 
has  led  to  a  use  of  both  limbs  of  the  process  again  in  a  more 
harmonious  manner.  Some  of  the  principal  facts  regarding 
the  nature  of  children  have  been  sketched  in  the  preceding 
chapters  under  such  headings  as  instincts,  habits,  knowl- 
edge, ideals,  etc.  But  along  with  this  knowledge  and  con- 
stant study  of  a  technical  character  on  the  part  of  the 
teacher  go  a  spirit  of  love,  of  reverence,  and  sympathetic 
open-mindedness  such  as  characterized  super-teachers  like 
Pestalozzi  among  his  orphans  in  Switzerland  and  the  Great 
Teacher  among  the  fishermen  of  Galilee. 

The  factors  of  teaching  efficiency,  in  the  third  place, 
are  not  hard-and-fast  matters,  and  are  only  now  being  sci- 
entifically determined.  The  great  need  has  been  for  definite 
social  standards  and  goals  toward  which  to  aim,  such  as 
health,  citizenship,  morality,  vocational  ability,  and  avoca- 
tional  efficiency,  and  carefully  derived  minimal  essentials, 
and  for  scientific  standards  arid  units  for  measuring  the 
results  obtained.  When  we  can  measure  in  the  light  of 
recognized  social  aims  the  work  of  teachers,  then  we  can 
make  more  definite  the  factors  of  teaching  skill.  The  meth- 
ods of  those  who  obtain  superior  results  with  a  minimum  of 
expenditure  of  time  and  energy  will  be  studied  as  will  those 
of  poor  teachers,  and  from  these  empirical  and  scientific 
data  more  helpful  principles  of  teaching  will  be  derived. 
What  we  have  to  offer  now  in  the  way  of  definite  guides 
to  success  is  not  very  extensive  or  scientific,  although  such 
books  as   Charter's  ''Methods  of  Teaching,''   and  others 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  395 

mentioned  later,  any  one  of  which  would  be  an  excellent 
introduction  to  the  study  of  the  writer^s  volume  dealing 
with  the  various  school  subjects,  are  approaching  what  is 
desired.  Teaching  is  the  guidance  of  learning.  If  no  one 
has  learned,  no  teaching  has  been  done.  If  the  child  be- 
comes a  good  learner,  his  teaching  has  prt)bably  been  good.^ 
Teaching  is  the  guidance  of  learning,  and  learning  is  the  test 
of  teaching. 

II.    Classroom  Management 

Good  class  management  and  sound  health  on  the  part 
of  the  pupils  are  fundamental  requisites  to  good  class 
teaching.  As  suggested  before,  the  health  basis,  with  many 
exceptions,  is  still  woefully  neglected  in  American  schools. 
Tuberculosis  and  typhoid,  diphtheria  and  scarlet  fever  still 
slay  their  thousands  unnecessarily,  while  multitudinous 
physical  defects  make  for  serious  retardation  and  defeat  of 
the  teacher's  best  efforts.  Parker  reports  in  his  volume  on 
"Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  Schools,"  a  common  judg- 
ment of  pupils  grown  up:  "On  no  one  point  is  there  more 
unanimity  than  the  want  of  attention  to  bodily  health  and 
exercise;  not  one  (of  the  college  students  reporting)  has  any- 
thing favorable  to  say  on  this  point,  and  many  accuse  the 
(high)  school  in  extenso  of  its  dereliction  in  physical  educa- 
tion." One  student  writes:  "During  the  first  three  years  I 
do  not  recall  a  single  suggestion  by  any  teacher  to  get  out 
in  the  open  air — or  anywhere  else.  At  noon  most  of  us 
stayed  indoors  and  either  strolled  up  and  down  some  very 
dark  corridors,  or  sat  at  our  desks  and  studied.  The  self- 
ventilating  heating  system  was  then  in  vogue,  and  the  teach- 
ers had  orders  not  to  open  the  windows,  so  that  the  rooms 
were  stuffy,  and  the  pupils  drowsy."  ^     Another  chapter 

^Strayer  and  Norsworthy's  "How  to  Teach  "  is  a  very  helpful  dis- 
cussion of  educational  psychology  for  teachers.  It  treats  of  recent  prin- 
ciples of  educational  psychology. 

2  From  Sisson's  article  on  "  College  Students'  Comments  on  Their  Own 
High  School  Training,"  in  the  School  Review  for  October,  191 2. 


39^  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

brings  forward  this  general  health  basis,  and  suggests  how 
some  of  the  principal  conduct-controls,  especially  habits, 
may  be  established  that  will  help  insure  health.  The  gen- 
eral care  of  environment  through  class  management  also 
can  hardly  be  termed  teaching,  and  yet  lies  at  the  basis  of 
teaching  efficiency. 

Discipline,  order,  scientific  management  in  the  more 
mechanical  phases  of  classroom  procedure,  proper  arrange- 
ment of  the  programme,  keeping  the  schoolroom  sanitary, 
and  many  other  phases  outside  of  teaching  itself  are  of  great 
importance,  not  at  all  to  be  lightly  considered  by  the  teacher. 
In  business  as  well  as  in  some  of  our  best  schools,  many  of 
the  most  profitable  increases  in  efficiency  and  decreases  of 
waste  and  lost  motion  are  attained  by  painstaking  analysis 
of  such  seeming  trifles  as  how,  with  less  labor  and  better 
results,  to  paste  labels  on  cans,  or  to  lay  bricks  with  fewer 
motions,  and  in  schools  by  investigation  of  such  problems 
as  the  proper  planning  of  the  programme,  the  passing  out 
of  books,  taking  of  records,  correlating  subjects,  reducing 
tardiness  and  absence,  seating  pupils,  preventing  disorder, 
etc.  Such  books  as  Bagley's  *Xlassroom  Management" 
and  "School  Discipline '^  the  teacher  should  be  famihar  with, 
and  she  should  get  from  them  the  attitude  of  careful  study 
of  the  practical  classroom  problems  which  are  not  an  in- 
tegral part  of  teaching  in  the  narrow  sense. 

III.    Principles  of  Teaching 

Some  of  the  general  principles  of  teaching  now  coming 
commonly  to  be  accepted  and  supported  by  a  growing  num- 
ber of  scientific  investigations  may  be  summarized  as  follows : 

I.  The  natural  child,  as  Rousseau  and  his  followers 
have  emphasized,  must,  as  suggested  in  the  previous  chap- 
ter, be  taken  into  consideration.  Education  is  a  process  of 
growth,  not  of  accretion.  The  instinctive  tendencies  ar». 
not,  however,  to  be  merely  coddled  and  pampered.     They 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  397 

are,  as  Dewey  suggests  in  his  "School  and  Society/'  the 
natural  resources  which  stimulate  the  child  to  activity 
along  a  number  of  different  lines,  many  of  them  leading  to 
habitual  activities  of  much,  little,  or  no  value  at  the  present 
time.  The  instinct  for  repetition  is  valuable  in  that  it 
makes  possible  a  natural  way  of  getting  the  training  neces- 
sary to  the  formation  of  desirable  habits.  The  instinct  for 
physical  activity  and  play  can,  with  little  loss  of  energy, 
be  directed  into  types  of  activity  that  make  for  firmly  estab- 
lished habits,  knowledge,  ideals,  interests,  prejudices,  tastes, 
and  attitudes  that  will  help  the  individual  and  his  fellows 
to  make  for  a  higher  type  of  community  well-being.  The 
constructive  interest  can  be  guided  into  artistic,  avocational, 
and  industrial  lines.  In  general,  "take  the  power  otherwise 
going  to  waste  or  causing  damage  and  utilize  it  for  educa- 
tive ends"  would  be  a  first  principle  of  method.  Get 
pupils  to  want  the  right  things  by  the  help  of  instinctive 
interests  and  then  help  them  to  obtain  them. 

2.  Motivation. — ^A  corollary  is  the  law  of  motivation, 
namely,  that  other  things  being  equal,  mental  connections, 
the  prime  factors  in  education,  will  be  more  likely  to  be 
made  with  economy  and  hooked  up  with  the  life  situations 
in  which  they  are  needed  if  the  interest,  motives,  and  de- 
sires of  children  are  aroused  or  utilized.  Dewey  started  his 
laboratory  school  with  the  intention  of  discovering  how  far 
the  work  of  the  school  could  be  as  naturally  motivated  as 
is  the  play  life  of  children  outside  of  the  school,  or  as  is  the 
self-directed  activity  of  adults  at  their  daily  activities. 
Thorndike  shows  that  "the  prime  law  in  all  human  control 
is  to  get  the  man  to  make  the  desired  response  and  to  be 
satisfied  thereby,"  and  that  satisfying  results  strengthen, 
and  discomfort  weakens,  the  bond  between  situation  and  re- 
sponse. The  way  to  get  the  right  response  to  a  stimulus  or 
situation  is  to  provide  motivation. 

3.  Repetition  is  both  an  instinct  and  a  most  important 
teaching  factor  in  establishing  habits,  fixing  knowledge  so 


398  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

it  may  be  recalled,  and  furnishing  the  basis  for  attitudes 
and  ideals.  It  rests  on  the  fundamental  laws  of  learning. 
Have  pupils  repeat  the  acts,  principles  and  facts  which  you 
would  have  them  master.  See  that  they  have  a  good  stir- 
ring motive  for  the  repetition.  Give  opportunity  for  the 
use  and  exercise  of  knowledge  and  skill  gained,  not  only  at 
or  near  the  time  of  learning,  but  throughout  the  years  of 
school  life  thereafter.  Distribution  of  repetition  is  as  im- 
portant as  initial  repetition,  because  of  the  tendency  for 
mental  connections  or  modifications  to  be  weakened  or 
broken  with  time,  occasioning  loss  of  skill  and  forgetting. 
Not  only  drill  at  the  time  of  initial  learning,  but  frequent 
repetition  and  practical  use  over  months  and  years  of  time 
are  necessary. 

4.  Learning  With  Life  Situation. — The  response  must  be 
firmly  connected  with  a  specific  stimulus  or  stimuli,  such 
as  the  response  thirty,  when  "  five- times-six  "  is  the  stimulus, 
and  this  stimulus  must  be  like  that  or  those  which  should 
call  it  forth  in  the  life  of  the  individual.  As  spelling  is 
principally  used  in  the  writing  of  letters,  it  is  desirable  to 
have  much  of  the  spelling  learned  and  drilled  in  script  form 
and  in  the  writing  of  letters.  We  want  pupils  to  be  able 
not  merely  to  spell  in  the  classroom  under  given  conditions 
or  stimuli,  but  we  want  them  especially  to  know  how  to 
spell  correctly  when  they  are  seated  before  letter-paper 
and  are  engrossed  with  the  thought  they  are  trying  to 
communicate.^  The  nearer  the  school  situation  is  like  the 
life  situation,  the  more  surely  will  correct  spelling  be  the 
result.  Tuskegee  Institute  is  one  of  the  best  illustrations 
of  the  application  of  this  principle.  Recent  changes  in  our 
rural  schools  have  been  very  largely  in  this  general  direction. 

5.  Attention. — All  teachers  are  concerned  with  getting 
and  holding  the  attention  of  their  pupils  to  the  learning 

^  Judd's  "  Measuring  the  Work  of  the  Public  Schools  "  seems  to  show 
that  for  Cleveland  children,  at  least,  isolated  words  are  spelled  about  as 
correctly  as  they  are  when  used  in  sentences,  but  our  thesis  holds  good. 


Teachers  learning  vegetable  gardening  at  a  summer  school 


Giving  the  girls  a  chance  at  West  Alexandria,  Ohio 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  399 

process  in  which  they  must  engage.  When  the  work  is 
closely  related  to  the  natural  tendencies  of  the  children,  as 
in  an  arithmetic  game,  or  "ciphering  match,''  the  problem 
of  getting  all  to  participate  with  their  best  efforts  is  not  so 
great,  but  with  an  idea  or  purpose  which  requires  effort  not 
lying  along  the  path  of  instinctive  or  acquired  connections, 
attention  on  the  part  of  all  is  harder  to  get.  The  types  of 
attention  are  three  or  four:  passive,  active,  secondary  pas- 
sive, and,  as  the  writer  has  termed  it,  dynamic  zealous. 
The  first  is  the  instinctive,  spontaneous  type;  the  second  is 
the  active,  voluntary  type  in  which  we  must  make  an  effort 
against  natural  or  other  tendencies,  to  hold  our  attention 
and  activities  to  the  line  of  our  purpose;  the  third  is  the  out- 
come of  voluntary  or  active  attention,  a  kind  of  attention 
which  comes  through  the  struggle  of  active  attention,  as 
when  we  learn  to  like  composition  writing,  which  we  had 
disliked,  after  sticking  to  it  long  enough;  and  fourth,  as  an 
example,  we  should  probably  name  the  type  of  attention  of 
the  zealot,  the  genius,  the  person  of  tremendous  concentra- 
tion and  zeal  who  puts  emotion,  enthusiasm,  and  dynamic 
energy  into  his  line  of  activity.  Most  teachers  wish  they 
could  get  the  baseball,  football,  and  basket-ball  teams  to 
engage  in  class  recitations  and  in  study  as  they  participate 
with  frenzy  in  these  games.  We  all  know  persons  who  are 
marked  by  the  concentrated,  energetic  manner  in  which 
they  hew  to  the  line  of  their  purpose  regardless  of  how 
naturally  distasteful  the  activity  may  be.  How  to  rise 
through  these  levels  of  attention,  how  the  child  learns  to 
attend,  are  problems  of  educational  psychology  and  teach- 
ing, but  these  are  the  phases  which  must  be  distinguished.  ^ 
Discussions  of  interest,  instinct,  purpose,  habituation,  and 
the  types  of  lessons  discussed  elsewhere  will  clarify  somewhat 
these  problems. 


400  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

IV.    General  Methods 

Types  of  Teaching. — There  are  frequently  many  methods 
of  accomplishing  the  same  result,  and  there  are  various 
special  methods  of  accomplishing  different  results.  We 
can  without  much  trouble  see  how  each  of  the  four  conduct- 
controls,  distinguished  by  Bagley  and  others,  may  by  ap- 
propriate methods  be  established  along  the  special  lines  re- 
quired to  promote  each  of  the  five  ends  of  education  so 
frequently  reiterated  in  this  discussion.  On  the  left,  if  shown 
diagrammatically,  we  would  have  the  five  ends  such  as 
health,  citizenship,  morality,  etc.;  to  the  right  of  each  we 
would  place  the  four  conduct-controls,  such  as  habits, 
knowledge,  ideals,  etc.;  and  to  the  right  of  each  of  these 
twenty  items  the  methods  that  should  be  used  to  help  insure 
these  ends.  For  health,  or  vital  efficiency,  as  a  first  aim, 
e.  g.,  we  should  have  to  show  how  specifically  useful  health 
hahits,  for  example,  could,  by  skilful  teaching,  be  established 
in  children,  such  as  by  asking  children  how  many  had  slept 
with  their  windows  open  the  night  before,  how  many  had 
used  a  tooth-brush,  etc.,  personal  examinations  of  hands, 
hair,  clothing,  etc.,  for  cleanliness  and  for  putting  the 
stamp  of  class,  teacher,  and  social  approval  on  right  health 
practices  and  the  stamp  of  disapproval  on  their  opposites, 
until  these  habits  were  fully  set — attention  by  teachers  to 
such  matters  to  continue,  however,  until  the  child  has 
passed  beyond  the  years  of  school  life.  Then,  second, 
would  come  the  methods  of  giving  sound  and  applicable 
health  knowledge  in  such  a  way  as  would  make  it  permanent 
and  easy  to  recall  when  needed,  such  as  the  right  use  of 
hygiene  text-books,  of  illustrations,  of  stories,  of  visits  to 
places  that  show  good  or  bad  sanitary  conditions,  getting 
pupils  to  work  to  help  solve  some  problem  of  home,  school, 
oi  community  health,  etc.  Then  would  come  the  develop- 
ment of  proper  health  ideals,  and  finally,  prejudices  and  atti- 
tudes j  or  appreciations,  through  developing  a  feeling  of  ad- 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  4OI 

miration  for  those  who  live  healthily  and  of  disgust  for  those 
who  do  not,  general  repugnance  to  stuffy  rooms,  to  flies, 
to  dirt,  to  the  use  of  alcohol  and  tobacco,  and  to  general 
uncleanliness  and  poor  regimen. 

Thorndike  discusses  the  following  seventeen  phases  or 
types  of  methods  of  teaching,  about  which  there  has  been 
considerable  discussion:  Methods  for  drill,  or  habituation; 
methods  for  reasoning,  or  analysis;  realistic  versus  verbal 
teaching;  laboratory  or  experimental  methods;  inductive 
methods;  teaching  by  action  and  dramatization;  the  lec- 
ture method;  object-lessons  and  demonstrations;  telling 
versus  questioning:  The  Socratic  method;  "developing" 
methods;  education  by  self-activity;  the  methods  of  dis- 
covery; teaching  pupils  how  to  study;  example  and  pre- 
cept; imperative,  persuasive,  and  suggestive  methods; 
evasive,  suppressive,  and  substitutive  methods;  reward  and 
punishment. 

General  Method. — If  we  were  to  compress  in  a  nutshell 
the  general  method  of  teaching  it  would  he,  first,  to  get  the 
child  (or  class)  by  some  form  of  motivation  to  desire  to  do 
or  to  accomplish  what  is  desirable  for  him  to  do  or  accom- 
plish along  the  lines  of  some  aim  of  education;  second,  to 
get  him  to  get  the  purpose  and  plan  of  what  he  is  attempt- 
ing to  do  clearly  in  mind;  third,  to  get  him  to  engage  ac- 
tively and  energetically  in  this  educative  activity;  fourth, 
to  persist  in  practice  and  drill  until  he  has  accomplished 
what  he  set  out  to  do,  e.  g.,  to  make  a  pair  of  skis  in  manual 
training,  or,  after  he  has  accomplished  successfully  his  aim, 
to  write  a  composition,  for  the  benefit  of  another  boy,  on 
how  best  to  make  skis;  a,nd  fifth,  to  verify  or  test  his  product 
by  applying  it  or  using  it  in  some  manner  to  see  if  it  satisfies 
his  original  aim.  Our  knowledge  of  the  extent  of  individual 
differences  will,  of  course,  help  us  to  avoid  the  narrow  for- 
maHsm  of  putting  every  child  in  every  lesson  through  the 
same  steps. 

"  Strictly  speaking,"  says  Dewey,  "  method  is  thoroughly 


402  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

individual.  Each  person  has  his  own  instinctive  way  of 
going  at  a  thing;  the  attitude  and  the  mode  of  approach 
and  attack  are  individual.  To  ignore  this  individuality  of 
approach,  to  try  to  substitute  for  it,  under  the  name  of 
*  general  method,'  a  uniform  scheme  of  procedure,  is  simply 
to  cripple  the  only  effective  agencies  of  operation,  and  to  over- 
lay them  with  a  mechanical  formalism  that  produces  only 
a  routine,  conventional  type  of  mental  quality."  In  his  vol- 
ume on  *'How  We  Think"  and  elsewhere  he  gives  also,  with 
certain  warnings  thrown  out,  excellent  outlines  of  general 
method.  In  the  paragraph  following  the  one  quoted  above 
we  find,  for  example,  this  excellent  analysis  of  the  general 
method  of  efficient  teaching,  following  closely  the  general 
method  of  learning: 

The  primary  factor  in  general  method,  so  construed,  is  the  exist- 
ence of  a  situation  which  appeals  to  an  individual  (the  pupil)  as  his 
own  concern  or  interest,  that  is  to  say,  as  presenting  an  end  to  be 
achieved,  because  arousing  desire  and  effort. 

The  second  point  is  that  the  conditions  be  such  as  to  stimulate 
observation  and  memory  in  locating  the  means,  the  obstacles,  and 
resources  that  must  be  reckoned  with  in  dealing  with  the  situation. 

The  third  point  is  the  formation  of  a  plan  of  procedure,  a  theory 
or  hypothesis  about  the  best  way  of  proceeding. 

The  fourth  is  putting  the  plan  into  operation. 

The  fifth  and  last  is  the  comparison  of  the  result  reached  with 
what  was  intended,  and  a  consequent  estimate  of  the  worth  of  the 
method  followed,  a  more  critical  discernment  of  its  weak  and  its 
strong  points. 

These  five  points  may  be  reduced  to  three  more  generic  ones. 
The  first  and  fundamental  condition  of  right  method  is  the  existence  of 
some  concrete  situation  involving  an  end  that  interests  the  individual 
and  that  requires  active  and  thoughtful  effort  in  order  to  be  reached. 
The  second  is  consideration  of  the  nature  of  the  problem,  the  difficulty 
or  perplexity  involved  in  reaching  the  end  set,  so  as  to  form  a  sugges- 
tion or  conjecture  as  to  the  best  way  of  proceeding  to  solve  the  diffi- 
culty. The  third  is  the  overt  effort  in  which  the  thought  of  the  plan 
is  applied  and  thereby  tested.  Scientific  method  will  be  found  to 
involve  exactly  the  same  steps,  save  that  a  scientific  mode  of  ap- 
proach implies  a  large  body  of  prior  empirical  and  tentative  procedures 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  403 

which  have  finally  been  sifted  so  as  to  develop  a  technique  consciously 
formulated  and  adapted  to  the  given  type  of  problem. 

These  principles  of  procedure  most  in  accord  with  the 
learning  process  of  the  student  deserve  wide  illustration 
and  application  to  the  various  types  of  teaching,  (i)  The 
first  principle  is  that  of  motivation,  or  providing  the  situa- 
tion. The  little  child  who,  for  example,  suddenly  notices 
on  the  piano  a  box  of  candy  which  he  immediately  wants 
very  much  to  get  has  before  him,  or  is  immersed  in,  a  natural 
situation  where  the  motive  for  action  is  very  real.  If  the 
parent  had  placed  the  candy  there  and  then  had  led  the 
child  to  notice  it,  we  should  have  not  a  purely  "natural,'' 
but  a  teaching,  situation.  (2)  The  conditions  here  are  such, 
especially  if  this  is  a  new  situation  to  the  child,  as  to  "stim- 
ulate observation  and  memory  in  locating  the  means,  the 
obstacles,  and  resources  that  must  be  reckoned  with  in 
deaHng  with  the  situation,"  for  the  child  naturally  sizes 
up  the  situation,  probably  looking  at  the  piano-bench  or 
stool,  at  a  low  chair,  or  his  high  chair,  and  thinking  vaguely 
that  these  might  be  utilized  in  reaching  the  candy.  (3) 
Next  comes  a  plan  or  theory  of  action,  a  tentative  solution 
to  the  problem.  He  thinks  of  climbing  upon  the  piano- 
bench,  perhaps,  and  trying  to  reach  the  candy,  or  he  hesi- 
tates between  the  use  of  the  bench  and  the  chair.  (4)  He 
tentatively  decides  upon  and  tries  out  one  of  his  methods, 
say  the  use  of  the  bench,  gets  upon  it,  probably  with  some 
effort,  and  reaches  upward.  (5)  If  he  finds  he  is  too  short 
to  reach  the  candy,  he  instantly  estimates  the  value  of  that 
plan  at  zero.  Other  natural  steps  may  here  be  added: 
(6)  He  next  gets  his  high  chair  and  (7)  with  it  reaches  the 
candy,  and  (8)  credits  the  plan  one-hundred-per-cent  good. 
The  method  is  one  of  self-activity,  and  the  teacher  is  not 
obtrusively  present.  What  is  true  of  the  little  child  is  true, 
in  general,  of  the  adult. 

Teaching  as  the  Supervision  of  Learning. — The  ideal  of 
the  best  teachers  is  to  make  the  teaching  process  the  unob- 


404  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

trusive  guidance  of  the  learning  process,  as  natural  as  the 
undirected  activity  of  the  little  child  in  solving  a  problem 
by  adapting  means  to  ends,  by  weighing  alternatives,  and 
by  putting  forth  persistent  effort  of  a  self-active  kind.  In 
the  ordinary  artificial  type  of  school  it  takes  great  ingenuity 
on  the  part  of  teachers,  principals,  and  supervisors  to  ap- 
proximate the  lifelike  naturalness  of  the  situations  of  the 
child  in  the  home  and  of  the  man  and  woman  at  their  daily 
work  in  the  natural  life  of  the  world.  One  of  the  greatest 
changes  taking  place  in  methods  of  teaching  and  adminis- 
tration is  just  along  this  line  of  making  more  natural,  mean- 
ingful, and  lifelike  the  learning  process  of  children  in  school. 
Instead  of  spending  their  time  in  making  merely  formal 
technical  joints  of  wood  in  manual  training,  for  example, 
children  are  more  and  more  given  the  opportunity  to  make 
things,  often  in  co-operative  groups,  which  they  really  de- 
sire to  have,  as  they  desire  and  make  their  kites,  dolls,  base- 
ball diamonds,  wagons,  caves,  playhouses,  and  the  like, 
outside  of  school.  They  are  put  into  natural  situations 
where  they  will  wish  to  solve  problems  involving  arithmetic, 
and  where  they  want  to  write  plans  for,  work  out,  and  test 
letters  and  compositions.  Through  careful  guidance  of 
this  kind  children  are  gaining  habits  of  independence  in 
working  out  the  solutions  to  practical  problems  as  near  like 
the  problems  of  every-day  life  as  possible.  We  must  train 
children  to  be  effective  in  life  by  placing  them  in  life  situa- 
tions and  guiding  them  to  power  and  control  over  them  as 
unobtrusively  and  as  much  behind  the  scenes  as  possible. 
The  educational  weakness  of  the  average  life  situation  out 
of  school  is  that  it  lacks  either  in  skilled  guidance,  progressive 
sequence,  breadth  of  outlook  and  connections.  The  teach- 
er's aim  is  ultimately  to  make  herself  useless.  When  she 
is  forever  at  the  centre  of  the  stage  doing  all  the  talking, 
acting,  experimenting,  illustrating,  and  thinking  she  is  not 
guiding    the   learning   process    and    she   is  not  educating 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  405 

children,  except  for  a  certain  ^'education  in  stupidity." 
The  happy  mean  here  is  difficult  of  attainment  in  most 
schools. 

V.    The  Types  op  Teaching 

Although  they  all  follow  a  somewhat  general  plan,  dif- 
ferent phases  of  teaching  and  learning  may  be  emphasized. 
One  writer  discusses  several  phases  under  the  following 
headings,  to  which  we  add  briefly  their  several  meanings. 

^^  Expression,''^  giving  children  opportunity  to  learn 
through  self-expression  and  doing  things  rather  than  being 
mere  passive  listeners  and  manipulators  of  second-hand 
knowledge. 

^^  Practice, ^^  encouraging  children  to  perfect  themselves 
by  repeated  efforts  in  the  various  skills  which  they  must 
obtain. 

^'ObJ edification/^  making  the  learning  of  children  con- 
crete in  the  sense  of  being  objective,  ^' object- teaching, '' 
laboratory  apparatus,  demonstrations,  excursions,  use  of 
material  things,  pictures,  etc.,  for  illustrations. 

^^  Induction, '^  helping  children  to  do  their  own  thinking 
through  the  discovery  of  principles  from  particular  facts, 
finding  similarities  which  embrace  many  experiences,  learn- 
ing through  the  use  of  type  studies,  following  the  five  formal 
steps  of  Herbart  as  refined  by  Dewey  in  his  ''How  We 
Think.'' 

^' Deduction, ^^  giving  children  ability  to  select  the  prin- 
ciples which  govern  particular  cases  which  are  problematic 
to  them,  to  apply  general  principles  to  particular  problems, 
and  to  gain  pow'er  in  guiding  conduct  in  the  light  of  general- 
ized experience,  and  reciting  by  topics  under  certain  condi- 
tions. 

^^ Formal  Association,'^  helping  children  to  learn  the 
meaning  of  words  of  language  and  formal  linguistic  symbols, 
by  associating  symbols  with  meanings,  if  possible  in  their 


406  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL  SCHOOL 

concrete  life  settings  rather  than  in  a  highly  artificial  man- 
ner. 

^^  Study, ''^  giving  children  ability  and  opportunity  to 
get  knowledge,  develop  habits,  gain  ideals,  and  establish 
interests,  attitudes  and  appreciations  through  their  own 
independent  efforts,  training  in  the  technique  of  the  learning 
process,  including,  for  example,  memorizing  in  the  quick- 
est and  most  economical  manner,  and  getting  command  of 
the  various  tools  of  study  such  as  the  use  of  dictionaries, 
cyclopedias,  references,  etc. — teaching  as  the  supervision  of 
learning. 

^'  Discipline,''^  so  guiding  the  life  of  the  school  as  to  pro- 
mote the  best  working  spirit  on  the  part  of  all  and  as  to 
avoid  disorder  and  the  breaking  down  of  the  learning  proc- 
ess: by  holding  up  good  examples,  by  giving  clear  ideas  of 
the  meaning,  value,  and  purpose  of  conformity  to  the  social 
order  of  the  school  and  community,  and  by  expressive  con- 
trol, such  as  giving  opportunity  to  act  out,  to  work  off, 
wayward  emotions  in  desirable  ways,  rewarding  desirable 
actions  and  expressions,  neglecting  undesirable  actions  and 
robbing  them  of  their  stimuli,  surrounding  children  with  in- 
centives and  stimuli  to  worthy  efforts,  and  removing  tempta- 
tions to  undesirable  actions,  putting  the  stamp  of  disap- 
proval of  school  and  teacher  upon  unworthy  action,  and  by 
substituting  channels  of  desirable  response  for  those  which 
are  offensive.     (Also  used  in  the  sense  of  training.) 

^^  Appreciation,^^  cultivating  the  esthetic  feelings  and  re- 
sponses of  children,  such  as  a  sense  of  humor,  love  of  the 
beautiful,  spirit  of  sportsmanship,  taste  in  dress,  love  of 
good  music,  love  of  desirable  forms  of  recreation  and  harm- 
less enjoyment,  etc.,  and  furnishing  ways  to  provide  esthetic 
expression  along  the  various  lines  these  responses  are  to  be 
cultivated.  (Also  used  to  cover  interests,  tastes,  prejudices, 
points  of  view,  etc.) 

^^Instruction,'''  giving  information  to  children  directly 
by  short  talks,  reading,  etc.,  in  which  the  children  take  the 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  407 

part  principally  of  listeners  and  the  teacher  that  of  the 
story-teller,  the  lecturer,  the  instructor — the  principal 
method  in  German  and  French  schools. 

^^ Investigation j'^  encouraging  children  to  learn  things  for 
themselves,  to  go  to  sources  and  facts  and  interpret  them 
for  themselves,  to  gain  power  in  independent  study. 

'^  Development y'^  a  blend  of  the  two  types  above,  in  which 
teachers  and  pupils  co-operate,  and  there  is  more  of  ^^give 
and  take"  in  the  lessons — large  use  of  question  and  answer, 
or  Socratic,  method,  and  careful  guidance  of  the  pupils* 
self-activity. 

^^  Recitation,''^  in  the  present  restricted  sense  of  the  term, 
hearing  the  children  report  on  what  they  have  studied,  a 
memory  lesson  largely.  (Frequently  used  for  any  lesson 
not  a  study  lesson.) 

^^  Examination j*^  testing  rather  large  units  of  subject- 
matter  in  a  more  or  less  formal  manner,  frequently  by  having 
pupils  write  on  what  they  have  learned  and  have  been  taught 
— desirable  as  an  incentive  and  review,  especially  for  older 
pupils;  gives  pupils  educative  opportunity  independently 
to  organize  and  clarify  their  knowledge  or  improve  their 
habits. 

''Review,''^  fixing  learning  by  repeating,  applying,  and 
reorganizing  it  at  less  frequent  intervals  than  the  brief  recall 
of  related,  apperceptive  knowledge  at  the  daily  recitation 
or  lesson. 

^'  Assignment,''^  helping  children  when  left  to  themselves, 
to  take  up  new  work  or  to  drill  on  old  work  in  an  effective 
and  economical  manner,  without,  however,  robbing  them 
of  their  own  opportunities  to  grow  unaided — usually  slighted 
as  a  phase  or  type  of  teaching. 

Other  Lists. — Such  a  list  of  important  phases  and  types 
of  teaching  is  valuable  in  calling  attention  to  the  richness 
and  variety  of  methods  by  which  to  achieve  the  various 
educational  aims  with  the  manifold  types  of  children  at 
various  times.  ^  The  most  important  of  these  types  are  each 


4o8  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RUILA^L  SCHOOL 

given  a  chapter  in  Earhart's  volume  on  *' Types  of  Teach- 
ing/' treating  each  of  the  following  topics: 

The  nature,  development,  and  purposes  of  subject- 
matter,  the  ideas,  attitudes,  and  feelings,  and  the  instincts, 
and  habits  with  which  children  come  to  school,  what  school 
education  should  accomplish  in  remaking,  extending,  so- 
cializing, and  individualizing  the  child's  experience,  the 
various  types  of  class  procedure  such  as  the  telling  exercise 
or  lecture  type  of  method,  the  object-lesson,  inductive  and 
deductive  lessons,  the  appreciation  lesson  or  exercise,  habit 
formation,  study,  the  assignment,  the  recitation  lesson,  re- 
views, socializing  phases  of  school  work,  and  making  lesson 
plans. 

Strayer,  in  his  volume  in  "The  Teaching  Process,"  deals 
with  the  various  phases  of  teaching  under  nineteen  differ- 
ent headings,  such  as: 

The  aim  of  teaching,  the  instincts,  attention,  drill,  in- 
ductive and  deductive  lessons,  appreciation  lesson,  study 
lesson,  review  or  examination  lesson,  the  recitation  lesson, 
questioning,  social  phases  of  the  recitation,  the  physical  wel- 
fare of  the  children,  moral  training,  class  management,  lesson 
plans,  the  supervision  of  teachers,  the  course  of  study,  and 
measuring  results  of  education. 

Each  of  the  authors  distinguishes  seven  different  types 
of  lessons:  inductive,  deductive,  drill,  study,  review,  ap- 
preciation, and  recitation  (memory)  lessons. 

Charters,  in  his  "Methods  of  Teaching,"  has  a  different 
organization  of  material,  but  treats  in  close  relation  with 
the  school  subjects  much  of  the  same  matter,  stressing  very 
helpfully  the  structure,  function,  value,  and  treatment  of 
subject-matter.  If  possible,  every  teacher  should  read  and 
digest  at  least  one  of  these  three  different  treatments  and 
test  out,  phase  by  phase,  the  different  principles  advanced. 
Each  is  written  by  practical  teachers  in  touch  with  actual 
school  problems  who  have  studied  scientifically  the  tech- 
nical principles  underlying  teaching. 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  409 

High-school  and  upper-grade  teachers  will  find  Parker's 
''Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  Schools"  (Ginn)  and  Col- 
vin's  "An  Introduction  to  High-School  Teaching"  (Macmil- 
lan)  very  helpful. 

VI.    Types  of  Lessons 

Lesson  Steps. — The  contribution  which  Bagley,  Strayer, 
and  others  have  made  in  analyzing  and  isolating  the  various 
(7)  t>TDes  of  lessons  should  also  be  made  the  heritage  of  every 
teacher.  Herbart  and  his  followers  devised  one  scheme  or 
series  of  steps  or  stages  to  be  used  for  practically  every 
lesson.  It  is  of  the  inductive  type  and  follows  methods  of 
teaching  used  in  Germany  where  text-books  are  little  em- 
ployed and,  in  a  rough  way,  the  steps  described  by  Dewey 
above  as  a  general  method.  These  "five  formal  steps"  of 
preparation,  presentation,  comparison  and  abstraction,  gen- 
eralization, and  application,  were  long  used  by  professional 
teachers  for  most  types  of  school  work.  But  we  do  not 
wish  a  child  always  to  be  thinking  through  for  himself  the 
solution  of  a  problematic  situation,  since  there  are  many 
other  than  problematic  situations  in  life  and  many  other 
needs  for  teaching.  We  may,  for  example,  wish  to  cultivate 
appreciation  and  love  of  good  music,  and  may  therefore 
have  musicians,  pianolas,  or  victrolas  perform  before  classes, 
with  no  thought  on  the  teacher's  part  of  developing  ability 
to  solve  problems  in  music  or  in  any  other  fields  thereby. 
The  aim  is  appreciation,  not  thinking  ability.  Other  aims 
such  as  habit  formation,  training  in  study,  testing  results, 
review,  gaining  information  largely  through  memory,  and 
so  on,  are  largely  overlooked  by  those  who  would  apply 
slavishly  these  five  formal  steps  to  all  lessons.  Even  Dewey's 
general  method  cannot  be  used  for  every  lesson,  or  as  a 
method-whole  covering  several  class  periods,  although  it  is 
of  the  greatest  value  for  a  large  share  of  the  best  teaching. 
Neither  Dewey  nor  Herbart  intended,  however,  such  slavish 


4IO  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

application  of  the  steps  and  the  former  specifically  warns 
against  such  wide  use.  As  we  shall  show,  the  problem  is  a 
very  valuable  centralizing  factor  for  making  purposive  and 
organized  the  development  of  many  types  of  knowledge, 
habits,  ideals,  and  appreciations.  Frank  McMurry  and 
Dewey  speak  of  it  as  the  fundamental  stimulus  and  guide 
to  learning,  and  would  organize  most  subject-matter  of  a 
course  of  study  not  as  a  series  of  topics  in  outline  but  as 
a  progressive  series  of  problems,  projects,  and  questions. 
Our  point  is  that  it  should  not  be  used  exclusively,  and  that 
many  types  of  lessons  are  desirable. 

In  general,  we  can  teach  pupils  to  think  and  to  work 
things  out  for  themselves  along  various  Hues;  we  can  de- 
velop their  ideals  and  appreciations  in  many  directions; 
we  can  drill  them  in  habits  which  are  necessary  and  which 
they  would  not  get  without  such  drill;  we  can  furnish  them 
with  knowledge  or  information  of  the  complex  world  in 
which  they  live;  we  can  provide  them  with  recreation; 
we  can  organize,  correlate  and  unify  their  mental  connec- 
tions of  whatever  sort;  we  can  help  them  apply  their  knowl- 
edge, skill,  and  ideals  to  life  situations  they  will  be  sure  to 
meet,  and  are  meeting,  and  we  can  test,  measure,  and  sum- 
marize their  mental  and  physical  attainments. 

Teaching  Children  to  Think. — To  attain  the  various 
social  aims  of  education  no  ability  on  the  part  of  children 
is  regarded,  in  theory,  with  more  approval  than  the  ability 
to  think  along  various  lines.  *^The  life  of  reason,"  or  the 
life  guided  by  reason,  is  the  goal  of  our  democratic  schools 
in  these  changing  times.  Even  in  a  primitive,  static,  and 
monarchical  system  or  society,  ability  to  think  well  is  of 
great  value  to  the  individual  although  not  encouraged  by 
the  state  along  social  and  political  lines.  If  America  is  to 
solve  the  problems,  individual  and  social,  which  now  beset 
her,  she  must  rear  a  thinking  population.  If  the  indi- 
viduals are  to  attain  the  goal  of  life  they  must  have  this, 
their  highest  capacity,  developed  and  made  habit  along  the 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  4II 

lines  of  the  principal  problems  of  life.  General  thinking 
ability  we  may  not  be  able  very  fully  to  develop,  but  we 
can  give  power  along  many  specific  lines  such  as  those  of 
health,  the  calling,  citizenship,  recreation,  and  morality, 
by  guided  exercise  in  these  fields. 

In  studying  the  methods  of  training  children  to  think 
in  the  past,  teachers  have  been  much  confused  and  hindered 
by  artificial  and  needless  distinctions  between  inductive 
and  deductive  thinking.  They  have  frequently  spent  more 
time  and  effort  in  attempting  to  distinguish  the  two  types, 
often  indistinguishable,  than  in  learning  the  important 
thing — how  to  teach  pupils  to  think.  We  shall  attempt  here 
to  point  out  no  more  than  the  general  method. 

The  Problem. — In  his  masterly  attack  on  formal  logic, 
entitled,  "Formal  Logic,"  Professor  Schiller  asserts  that  the 
answer  to  the  question,  "Why  do  we  think?"  was  first  dis- 
covered by  Professor  John  Dewey.  The  fundamental 
stimulus  and  provocative  of  thinking  Dewey  found  to  be 
the  problematic  situation,  in  other  words,  the  new  and 
strange  situation,  the  difficulty,  the  doubt,  the  perplexity, 
the  crisis,  the  dilemma.  The  task  of  devising  a  way  by 
which  to  get  some  candy  from  the  top  of  the  piano  was  to 
the  little  child  before  mentioned  a  problematic  situation, 
a  problem.  Had  he  obtained  candy  several  times  in  that 
precise  way  he  would  not  have  needed  to  think  at  the  time 
mentioned.  His  habits  of  pulling  up  the  high  chair,  climb- 
ing on  it,  and  reaching  for  the  candy  would  have  sufficed 
without  thinking.  Thinking  arises,  if  it  arises  at  all,  when 
our  customary  habits  fail  to  enable  us  successfully  to  meet 
a  life  situation.  To  plan  and  to  make  a  chair  is  a  problem 
to  a  boy  in  the  manual-training  shop,  but  to  a  chair-maker 
in  a  chair  factory  it  is  mere  habit.  To  the  untrained  teacher, 
the  arrangement  of  the  school  programme,  the  provision  of 
suitable  ventilation,  the  treatment  of  a  sick  pupil,  the  ar- 
rangement of  the  daily  lesson  plans,  ^  the  refractory  pupil, 

1  Doctors  Earhart's  and  Strayer's  books  give  practical  suggestions  for 
making  daily  lesson  plans. 


412  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

and  so  on,  are  all  problems.  By  experienced,  professional 
teachers  these  situations  are  met  almost  entirely  on  the  basis 
of  routine  habit. 

When  travelling  over  a  new  route,  for  a  further  ex- 
ample, we  come  to  a  fork  in  the  road  and  know  not  which 
way  to  choose,  we  are  in  a  typical  thinking  situation,  al- 
though commonly  there  are  more  than  merely  two  alter- 
natives. But  in  this  forked-road  situation,  unless  we  are 
impulsive,  heedless,  obstinate,  thoughtless,  we  stop  and 
consider,  '' wonder, ''  ''reflect,"  "reason,"  "investigate," 
''thinkr 

The  first  principle  of  teaching  children  to  think  is  to  put 
them  into  a  problematic  situation,  and  since  we  wish  to 
give  them  ability  to  think  on  the  affairs  of  life,  not  on  Chi- 
nese puzzles,  we  have  the  corollary  that  this  problematic 
situation  must  be,  not  some  problem  of  x,  y,  and  z,  how 
Caesar  could  build  his  bridge,  or  his  indirect  discourse, 
"how  many  angels  can  stand  on  the  end  of  a  pin,"  or  any 
other  remote  situation  unrelated  to  the  main  life  needs  and 
problems  of  our  people,  but  must  be  as  real  and  concrete  a 
problem  as  children  and  grown-ups  are  meeting  all  the  time 
out  of  school.     The  problem  is  the  worWs  greatest  educator. 

The  Tentative  Solutions  or  Hypotheses. — When  we  are 
confronted  and  stopped  in  our  daily  habitual  activities  by 
a  problematic  situation,  such  as,  shall  I  buy  a  new  hat, 
what  kind  of  hat  shall  I  buy,  what  shall  we  do  this  evening 
for  entertainment  or  profit,  where  shall  I  go  this  summer, 
shall  I  open  and  shut  the  school-windows  or  have  a  pupil 
do  it,  etc.,  our  minds  naturally  dwell  on  the  alternatives 
before  us.  The  summer  may  be  spent  at  many  places, 
each  with  its  good  and  bad  features  from  our  point  of  view. 
By  looking  over  the  situation  more  thoroughly  we  may  find 
a  way  in  which  to  spend  the  summer  more  profitably  and 
pleasantly  than  ever  before.  If  we  are  at  the  forking  of  a 
road  into  two  or  more  branches  we  try  to  see  what  each  of 
these  alternatives  would  mean  if  followed  up.     If  the  prob- 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  413 

lem  is  what  are  the  causes  of  deserts  we  encourage  the 
pupils  to  give  several  alternative  answers  or  tentative  solu- 
tions, without  letting  them  know  what  we  think  the  causes 
are.  We  encourage  them  to  think  of  several  possible  solu- 
tions to  the  problem,  and  we  usually  find  it  easy  to  get  them 
from  a  wide-awake  class.  Here  arises  a  second  great  rule 
of  thinking:  when  confronted  hy  a  difficulty ,  or  problematic 
situation,  cultivate  a  variety  of  alternative  solutions  to  the 
problem. 

By  cultivating  such  variety  we  vastly  increase  our,  or 
the  class's,  chances  of  thinking  out,  or  hitting  on,  the  right 
or  best  solution.  The  boy  who  knows  of  the  possibilities 
of  but  one  or  two  occupations  will  not  be  as  apt  to  choose 
the  best  occupation  for  himself  and  the  public  as  one  who, 
by  some  kind  of  vocational  guidance,  learns  of  several  or 
all  of  the  various  opportunities  before  him.  Many  of  us 
spend  much  of  our  time  foolishly  or  in  mere  drifting  because 
for  the  various  hours  of  the  day  or  week  we  do  not  con- 
sider the  many  profitable  ways  in  which  such  time  may 
be  spent.  People  say  we  lack  imagination  or  that  we  do 
not  think.  When  we  urge  a  class  or  an  individual  pupil  to 
suggest  other  possible  solutions  to  the  problem  before  it, 
we  shall  frequently  get  silly  or  stupid  answers,  especially 
if  the  children  have  never  had  any  training  in  thinking  in 
school.  But  some  of  the  seemingly  silly  answers  may  turn 
out  to  be  correct,  and  these  silly  or  weak  answers,  if  sincere, 
show  that  others  than  the  best  pupils  are  trying  to  con- 
tribute to  the  class  product;  and  moreover,  these  answers 
provide  good  training  in  testing  and  caution  for  both  those 
who  make  them  and  for  the  others.  The  number  and 
quality  of  the  suggestions  will  depend  upon  our  experience, 
our  memory,  our  imagination,  and  our  ability  to  get  from 
others  tentative  solutions. 

Testing  the  Hypotheses. — This  comes  out  in  the  third 
step  of  thinking  in  which  we  test  our  various  tentative  solu- 
tions,  conjectures,   guesses,   hypotheses,    alternatives,    the- 


414  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

ories,  notions,  ideas,  or  whatever  we  may  call  them.  We 
examine  each  alternative  critically  for  advantages  and  dis- 
advantages. The  infant  trying  to  get  the  candy  considers 
more  or  less  carefully  the  relative  advantages  or  disadvan- 
tages of  the  piano-bench,  another  chair,  the  high  chair,  etc., 
for  helping  him  solve  his  problem.  We  let  our  minds  go 
along  the  various  roads  before  us  trying  to  discover  which 
will  best  lead  to  our  destination.  We  consider  the  various 
possible  ways  of  spending  the  summer  and  balance  advan- 
tages and  disadvantages.  The  class  offers  in  step  two  sev- 
eral reasons  or  causes  for  deserts  which  the  teacher  writes 
on  the  blackboard,  perhaps,  as  a  Hst  of  possibilities,  and 
which  the  class  now  criticises.  It  may  find  on  considera- 
tion of  the  merits  and  demerits  of  the  various  answers  that, 
for  example,  a  combination  of  causes  named  is  in  their  best 
judgment  the  correct  solution.  The  teacher  may  leave  them 
for  a  time  with  this  notion,  or  she  may  lead  or  help  them,  or 
tell  them  outright  the  correct  answer.  If  she  does  this  be- 
fore the  pupils  have  done  this  testing  work,  however,  she 
has  defeated  their  thinking  and  robbed  them  of  the  oppor- 
tunity. This  is,  perhaps,  the  worst  single  fault  of  teachers, 
considering  the  importance  of  such  training. 

The  great  principle  here,  then,  would  be  to  lead  the 
pupils  to  test  out  in  several  ways,  or  in  all  possible  ways, 
the  tentative  solutions  which  they  can  summon  out  of  their 
experience,  their  imagination,  or  from  their  authorities. 
A  corollary  would  be  to  get  them  to  take  a  pride  in  avoiding 
jumping  at  a  conclusion,  in  keeping  their  minds  open,  real- 
izing that  a  better  answer  may  yet  be  given,  in  cultivating 
the  scientific  habit  or  attitude  of  mind  which  Dewey  in  his 
preface  to  ''How  We  Think  "  says  is  one  thing  most  needed 
in  American  education.  Too  many  of  us  make  hasty  con- 
clusions, fail  to  test  with  any  care  the  few  or  many  hy- 
potheses we  bring  to  birth,  gather  from  our  friends,  or  from 
our  reading,  take  things  on  hearsay  without  test,  close  our 
minds  to  new  suggestions,  thinking  we  have  the  one  and 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  4x5 

final  answer  to  anything  or  everything,  fail,  in  short,  to 
control,  and  guide  the  thinking  process. 

Concluding. — The  final  step  is  the  conclusion.  We  pass 
judgment  or  decide  that  the  answer  is  so  or  that  we  cannot 
discover  the  answer.  The  class  finally  concludes  that  the 
cause  of  deserts  is  so  and  so;  we  decide  that  we  shall  go  to 
a  certain  place  next  summer  because  it  outweighs  all  in  a 
surplus  of  advantages  over  disadvantages;  we  decide  to 
start  our  auto,  our  wagon,  or  our  feet  along  the  road  which 
we  think  is  better  or  best.  Our  thinking  stops  when  we 
make  the  decision.  After  that,  habit  sets  in  and  our  walk- 
ing or  driving  is  merely  habitual.  It  takes  time  for  a  class 
to  go  through  such  a  process,  perhaps  several  days  or  weeks 
for  the  entire  "method- whole.''  Several  good  pieces  of 
wood  may  be  spoiled  by  the  boy  who  is  working  out  the 
way  to  make  a  table.  We  do  not  naturally  take  easily  to 
thinking.  It  is  travail  and  hard  work.  It  is  easier  to  fol- 
low the  crowd,  to  read  from  the  book,  to  follow  our  first 
impulse  or  piece  of  advice  from  another,  in  short,  to  dodge 
thought.  But  only  by  thinking  do  we  gain  power  to  solve 
problems  along  the  line  of  our  life  problems — by  solving 
them,  not  by  accepting  ready-made  answers  which  our 
teachers,  our  books,  and  our  friends  are  so  ready  to  furnish 
us.  These  we  frequently  solicit  and  use  as  mere  hypotheses 
to  test,  but  not  as  substitutes  for  our  own  educative  self- 
activity.  Frequently,  in  a  class  it  will  be  desirable  to  make 
an  explicit  statement  of  the  problem  with  which  we  start. 

Appljring. — A  fifth  step,  not  in  the  thinking,  but  in  the 
lesson  or  series  of  lessons,  and  practically  always  taking 
place  in  a  real-life  situation,  is  that  of  going  on  and  applying 
the  principle  arrived  at  as  the  conclusion.  We  have  thought 
out  the  best  way  to  make  a  table  and  now  proceed  to  make 
it.  We  have  come  to  a  conclusion  as  to  where  we  shall 
spend  the  summer  and  proceed  to  go  there  or  make  prepa- 
rations for  spending  it  as  decided.  Frequently  this  step 
of  application  shows  us  that  we  have  erred  in  our  thinking 


4l6  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

and  usually  points  out  exactly  where  we  made  our  error. 
Our  plan  when  carried  out  gives  us  a  very  poor  table,  a  con- 
clusion that  will  not  work,  a  principle  that  fails  to  square 
with  the  facts.  After  considerable  thinking,  a  graduating 
class,  for  example,  decided  that  the  members  would  pur- 
chase a  piano  for  the  school.  But  when  they  attempted 
to  raise  the  needed  contributions  only  a  few  were  willing 
to  pay  the  proportionate  amount.  It  was  then  too  late  to 
think  out  another  solution.  They  failed  in  not  testing 
this  hypothesis  by  seeing  if  a  sufficient  number  would  pay 
the  proportioned  amount  at  the  earlier  date  when  they 
did  their  thinking.  We  older  people  frequently,  and  some 
continually,  bitterly  regret  our  neglect  of  important  phases 
of  thinking  which  •we  could  easily  have  worked  out  had  we 
been  more  systematic,  more  energetic,  and  more  conscious 
of,  or  better  trained  in,  the  technique  necessary  to  good 
thinking;  examining  carefully  our  problq^,  rousing  as  many 
good  tentative  solutions  or  suggestions  as  possible,  testing 
each  of  these  suggestions  and  comparing,  contrasting,  and 
weighing  them  for  preponderance  of  advantages  over  dis- 
advantages. It  is  fortunately  the  able  and  worthy,  usually, 
who  think  well  and  succeed,  and  the  weak,  defective,  and 
unworthy,  who  think  poorly,  or  not  at  all,  and  fail.  The 
steps  many  follow  in  class  are:  (i)  problem,  (2)  hypotheses, 
(3)  tests,  and  (4)  conclusion.  Our  mission  as  teachers  is  to 
increase  vastly  the  number  who  can  use  this  highest  instru- 
ment of  evolution,  the  ability  or  abilities  to  reason  along  the 
several  Unes  desirable  for  ourselves  and  the  public. 

The  Limits  of  the  Problem  Method. — Shall  we  then  at- 
tempt to  arrange  all  of  our  school  work  as  a  series  of  prob- 
lems, or  can  we  depend  upon  mathematics  to  give  us  such 
general  abilities?  As  suggested,  some  seem  to  incline  to 
the  former  view  in  the  previously  quoted  selection.  To 
both,  the  answer  is  no.  Much  of  the  work  can  be  arranged 
as  problems  for  thinking.  The  department  of  economics 
of  the  University  of  Chicago,  for  example,  has  recently  pub- 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  417 

lished  a  book  of  problems  for  class  use  covering  the  entire 
subject  of  elementary  economics  and  providing  practically 
little  other  reading  matter  in  exposition  of  the  subject, 
although  sources  are  utilized.  History,  geography,  hand- 
work, hygiene,  and  other  subjects,  may  be,  and  are  being, 
largely  organized  on  the  problem  or  "project"  basis.  Arith- 
metical problems  are  becoming  more  Ufelike,  dealing  with 
number  relations  which  pupils  meet  with  or  will  very  prob- 
ably meet.  Mathematics  can  hardly  get  over  the  weak- 
ness, however,  of  making  necessary  a  certain  type  and  order 
of  thinking,  largely  deductive,  which  is  different  from  the 
kind  of  thinking  described  above,  which  we  carry  on  accord- 
ing to  the  natural  way  in  which  the  mind  functions  and 
according  to  which  it  is  best  to  meet  the  problems  of  hfe. 
Furthermore,  ability  to  think,  even  exceptionally  well, 
which  many  may  gain  by  perseverance  in  one  field,  is  no 
guarantee  that  one  will  be  a  good  thinker  in  other  fields. 
We  have  tested  the  theory  (hypothesis,  suggestion,  or  con- 
juncture) of  formal  discipline  and  have  so  far  found  it 
wanting.  Our  minds  as  teachers  are  open,  but  wisdom 
indicaj;es  that  we  can  get  both  valuable  information  about 
the  world  in  which  we  live  and  power  to  think  in  that  world 
better,  or  only,  by  getting  our  training  in  solving,  not  formal, 
symbolic,  or  unlifelike  problems,  such  as  those  of  cube  root, 
and  rowing  a  boat,  etc.,  but  the  actual  problems  of  life. 
All  teachers  should  study  Professor  Dewey's  little  book  on 
this  subject  mentioned  above,  "How  We  Think."  Strayer's 
two  chapters  in  his  "The  Teaching  Process"  on  the  inductive 
and  deductive  types  of  lessons  are  helpful  short  statements 
of  methods.  Freeman's  book  on  "How  Children  Learn" 
contains  a  valuable  chapter  on  "Problem  Solving  or  Think- 
ing." 

The  Drill  Lesson. — Thinking  takes  place  when  our  al- 
ready formed  mental  connection  between  situations  and  re- 
sponses are  not  adequate  to  promote  satisfying  conduct. 
Life  is  so  complex  and  new  situations  are  so  frequent  to-day 


41 8  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

that  the  practical  needs  of  life  demand  in  all  an  ability  to 
think  and  adjust  themselves  to  changing  conditions.  After 
we  have  thought  through  a  situation  and  adjusted  ourselves 
to  it,  we  have  also  practically  thought  a  connection  through 
our  minds.  Practice  and  drill  make  the  connection  rela- 
tively permanent.  For  example,  a  teacher  or  pupil  in  a 
strange  city  or  locality  is  in  doubt  as  to  the  best  route  to 
the  school  the  first  time  he  is  to  go  to  it.  But  after  con- 
sidering and  testing  alternative  routes,  a  way  is  decided  on 
and  finally  taken  each  day.  In  a  short  time  teacher  or 
pupil  leaves  his  home  and  walks  to  school  unconscious  of  the 
route  taken  and  with  his  mind  probably  busy  with  some- 
thing else.  The  connection  made  by  conscious,  attentive, 
vigorous  thinking  is  the  wire  or  wires  laid  by  the  master 
lineman,  which  are  hereafter  to  carry  automatically  the 
stimuli  from  the  given  situation,  the  street,  over  to  the 
muscular  responses  which  control  taking  the  proper  route. 

Both  with  children  and  grown-ups  we  do  not  always 
find  thinking  forging  ahead  of  habit  and  making  the  con- 
nection. We  have  not  time,  opportunity,  nor  ability  to 
rediscover  all  knowledge  and  invent  all  answers  to  all  the 
problems  of  life.  Much  is  furnished  us  outright  as  the  out- 
comes of  others'  thinking,  as  vicarious  experience.  We  are 
heirs  to  millions  of  connections  which  we  simply  must  or 
do  take  and  make.  We  merely  appropriate  the  connection 
which  binds  temporarily  the  response  30  with  the  situation 
— the  teacher,  class,  and  conditions  making  for  an  attitude 
of  interest,  confidence,  and  obedience — and  the  stimulus, 
five  times  six;  and  the  teaching  and  study  processes  make  it 
more  or  less  permanent.  The  tool  subjects,  or  the  tool 
phases  of  subjects,  like  writing,  reading,  spelling,  the  funda- 
mentals in  arithmetic,  drawing,  construction  work,  and  so 
on,  are  practically  all  habits  to  be  formed.  The  laws  of 
memory  and  of  habit  formation  are  practically  the  same  in 
essentials  and  for  many  purposes  can  be  treated  together. 

Drill  may  be  defined  as  the  systematic  endeavor  to  fix 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  419 

firmly  habits  or  associations  between  stimuli  and  responses. 
The  stimuli  may  be  either  outer  sense  situations,  or  inner, 
mental  situations,  or  ideas.  The  mental  connections  or 
associations  may,  then,  be  formed  automatically  between 
the  following  sets: 

Sense  Stimuli tied  to Movements 

Sense  Stimuli tied  to Ideas 

Ideas tied  to Movements 

Ideas tied  to Ideas 

Some  of  the  leading  laws  and  factors  of  so-called  drill 
may  be  stated  as  follows; 

1.  Decide  very  carefully  in  the  light  of  educational 
principals  what  habits  and  associations  should  be  made 
automatic  or  habitual,  the  minimal,  essential  habits  neces- 
sary, and  those  which  are  optional  or  alternative.  Avoid 
drilling  on  non-essentials.  Twenty  per  cent  of  the  usual 
conservative  schooling  is  probably  relatively  non-essential. 
We  have  not  yet  selected  the  essentials  of  democratic  edu- 
cation in  either  urban  or  rural  communities. 

2.  Arrange  the  matter — facts,  habits,  skills,  knowledge 
— in  order  best  suited  for  economical  habituation  or  memori- 
zation.    Be  consistent  and  systematic  in  drill. 

3.  Be  sure  in  most  cases  that  pupils  have  a  good  motive 
for  drill,  that  they  understand  and  feel  the  need  of  making 
habitual  certain  mental  connections.  Put  vigor,  enthusiasm, 
and  vividness  into  the  drilling.  If  possible,  avoid  lifeless, 
monotonous,  undesired  drill. 

4.  Have  the  connections,  the  responses  to  the  various 
stimuli,  repeated  in  an  unvaried  form.  Avoid  attempting 
to  make  habits  or  permanent  associations  by  even  a  few 
repetitions. 

5.  Have  repetitions  carried  on  for  an  optimal  period  or 
periods  daily,  and  over  weeks  and  months  of  time,  until 
learned  as  well  as  is  desirable,  or  reasonably  possible,  with 
the  given  pupil  or  pupils  and  under  the  given  conditions. 


420  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

If  possible  have  standards  of  achievement  such  as  the 
Courtis  tests  in  arithmetic,  the  Ayres,  Thorndike,  and 
Freeman  scales  and  standards  in  penmanship,  and  in 
spelling,  the  Courtis  and  Thorndike  rates  in  reading,  and 
so  on.  Excuse  pupils  or  give  other  work  to  pupils  who  are 
up  to  or  above  the  standard  for  their  grade.  Get  pupils 
to  compete  with  themselves  by  trying  to  better  their  past 
performances.  Avoid  failing  to  distribute  the  automatic 
learning  over  considerable  periods  of  time,  attempting  too 
much  or  too  little,  and  do  not  fail  to  give  opportunities  to 
use  in  practical  ways,  or  in  life-situation  ways,  the  connec- 
tions being  formed. 

6.  Permit  no  exceptions  or  inaccuracies  to  occur  until 
the  habits  or  ideas  are  firmly  established.  Avoid  "break- 
ing training"  and  doing  things  in  other  ways  than  in  the 
ways  in  which  they  are  to  be  firmly  established.  Afterward 
is  the  time  for  innovations. 

7.  Get  pupils  to  take  a  pride  in  the  firm  estabhshing  of 
their  own  habits  when  they  are  not  under  the  teacher's 
care. 

8.  Give  additional  attention  and  emphasis  to  connec- 
tions of  especial  difficulty. 

9.  Be  sure  that  pupils  are  in  right  physical  and  mental 
health  for  drill  and  choose  the  best  times  for  it. 

10.  Use  your  examinations,  reviews,  tests,  and  measuring- 
of-results  periods  partly  if  not  largely  for  educative,  distrib- 
uted repetition  and  drill. 

The  Recitation,  or  Memory,  Exercise  or  Lesson. — This 
rather  poorly  named  phase  or  type  of  the  teaching  process 
is  quite  ancient  and  refers  not  to  the  class  period  in  which 
teacher  and  pupils  get  together,  as  it  is  commonly  used,  but 
to  only  those  types  of  class  periods  or  instruction  periods  in 
which  pupils  report,  recite,  or  repeat  what  they  have  learned 
in  study,  and  consequently  deals  more  with  the  content 
phases  of  study  than  drill  phases.  The  old  plan,  still 
widely  used  in  some  parts  of  the  world,  was  to  have  pu- 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  42 1 

pils  repeat  word  for  word  what  they  learned  in  a  book  or 
had  been  told.  It  is  desirable  for  children  to  gain  facts 
and  to  possess  in  memory  and  to  be  partially  acquainted 
with  a  wide  variety  of  accurate  information.  A  lack  of 
information  or  first-hand  experience  handicaps  one  greatly 
in  his  thinking,  for  he  has  few  sources  of  suggestions  and  of 
various  ideas  of  accomplishing  things.  But  to  teach  in- 
formation in  such  a  way  as  to  give  pupils  not  ideas  which 
they  can  profit  by  but  mere  *' words,  words,  words,"  is  to 
commit  the  common  error. 

Some  of  the  factors  of  success  in  the  use  of  this  type  of 
exercise  or  lesson  as  one  of  several  other  types  to  be  used  in 
the  period  are  to  use  topics  and  hold  pupils  responsible  for 
reciting  on  them,  clearly,  accurately,  and  at  some  length, 
using  the  best  principles  brought  out  on  memory  in  such 
volumes  as  Strayer  and  Norsworthy's  *'How  to  Teach," 
and  to  drill  on  the  facts  that  are  to  be  thoroughly  and 
permanently  learned  after  they  have  been  carefully  and 
conservatively  selected. 

We  cannot  treat  of  all  the  seven  types  of  lessons  at  length 
here,  but  the  most  important  have  been  considered.  The 
lesson  in  appreciation  should  be  studied  in  this  connection. 
In  general,  teaching  is  an  art  which  is  more  intricate  than 
the  art  of  medicine;  and  the  science  supporting  it  is  only 
partially  discovered,  organized,  and  applied.  A  good  teacher 
will  study  the  process  as  she  would  any  other  problem  of 
science.  Certain  sex  differences  in  teaching  country  children 
will  be  brought  out  in  the  following  chapter. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  Into   what   three   "fundamental   methods   of   class   instruction" 

does  Professor  Colvin  classify  ways  of  teaching?  (Chapter 
VIII  and  the  six  following  chapters  of  his  volume  on  "An  In- 
troduction to  High-School  Teaching"  (Macmillan).) 

2.  What  specific  rules  does  he  give  for  testing  the  knowledge  of 

pupils,  drill,  and  adding  new  knowledge? 


422  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

3.  How  does  this  classification  compare  with  that  made  by  Professor 

Parker  in  his  ''Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  School"  (Ginn)? 

4.  How  do  you  account  for  the  great  amount  of  space  taken  by  the 

above  writers  in  telling  how  to  train  pupils  to  think? 

5.  What  are  the  seven  types  of  lessons  given  by  Stray er  in  his  **  Teach- 

ing Process"  (Macmillan)  and  Earhart  in  her  "Types  of 
Teaching"?  Do  these  authors  name  any  types  not  covered  by 
Colvin's  three  and  Parker's  five? 

6.  As  a  principle  of  teaching  why  does  Parker  furnish  a  book  of 

"Exercises  for  'Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  School'"? 

7.  What  are  the  psychological  bases  for  the  "project  method,"  or 

use  of  projects  in  teaching?  Compare  your  answer  with  that 
given  by  Professor  Kilpatrick  in  the  Teacfters  College  Record  for 
November,  191 8  (published  by  Teachers  College,  Columbia 
University,  New  York  City). 

8.  What  educational  magazines  do  you  take  or  propose  to  take  as 

a  teacher?  Have  you  seen  the  Elementary  School  Journal  for 
elementary  teachers,  and  the  School  Review  for  secondary  teach- 
ers, both  published  by  the  University  of  Chicago  Press?  What 
rural-school  magazines  are  pubUshed?  Are  they  as  yet  of 
value  on  methods  of  teaching? 

9.  What  suggestions  da  you  obtain  twice  a  month  from  School  Lije^ 

published  since  August  i,  1918,  by  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Educa- 
tion? If  you  do  not  have  it,  send  to  Washington  for  it.  (Free 
to  administrative  educational  ofl5cials;  fifty  cents  a  year,  twenty- 
six  numbers,  to  others.) 
10.  Apply  the  principles  of  method  given  in  this  chapter  to  the  sub- 
jects you  expect  to  teach  or  are  teaching. 

SUMMARY  BY  POINTS 

1.  The  teaching  process  is  controlled  by  the  nature  of  children  and 

of  society.  Present-day  educational  science  is  helping  to  give 
definiteness  and  precision  to  methods  of  teaching. 

2.  Classroom  management  is  a  corollary  of  the  teaching  process  in 

schools  and  deserves  more  attention  and  study  than  it  usually 
receives.  Some  of  the  principal  aims  of  education  are  furthered 
by  scientific  class  management. 

3.  Teachers  should  make  the  natural  child  and  his  interests  the 

point  of  departure  in  teaching. 

4.  Motivation  of  teaching  along  the  many  lines  suggested  by  Wilson 

helps  children  to  grow  up  naturally,  guided  and  energized  by 
worthy  purposes.  The  main  problems  of  attention  are  met  in 
this  way. 


THE  TEACHING  PROCESS  423 

5.  There  are  many  types  of  teaching.     In  general,  we  are  developing 

knowledge,  habits,  ideals,  and  appreciations  of  service  to  the 
individual  and  society  in  meeting  the  fivefold  aim  of  education 
for  social  efiiciency. 

6.  The  elements  of  general  method  are  (i)  a  motive  or  felt  need, 

(2)  consideration  of  ways  of  meeting  the  need,  and  (3)  effort 
put  forth  to  test  and  apply  the  plan  decided  upon. 

7.  The  guidance  of  the  learning  process  should  be  unobtrusive  on 

the  part  of  the  teacher. 

8.  Several  lists  of  types  and  phases  of  teaching  frequently  discussed 

by  teachers  are  briefly  examined. 

9.  The  seven  types  described  by  Strayer  in  his  "Teaching  Process" 

and  Earhart  in  her  "Types  of  Teaching"  are  recommended  for 
study  and  guidance. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Alderman — "School  Credit  for  Home  Work."     Houghton  MifHin 

Co. 

2.  Bagley — "Classroom  Management."     Macmillan. 

3.  "School  Discipline."     Macmillan. 

4.  Betts— "The  Recitation."     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

5.  Brice — "Measuring  the  Efficiency  of  Teachers."     Public  School 

Publishing  Co. 

6.  Colvin,  A.   R. — "An   Introduction   to   High-School  Teaching." 

Macmillan. 

7.  Dewey — "Democracy  and  Education,"  also  articles  in  Monroe's 

"Cyclopedia  of  Education."     Macmillan. 

8.  "How  We  Think."     D.  C.  Heath  &  Co. 

9.  "School  and  Society."     University  of  Chicago  Press. 

10.  Freeman — "How  Children  Learn."     Macmillan. 

11.  Earhart— "Types  of  Teaching."     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

12.  Hall — "Educational  Problems."    Appleton. 

13.  Judd — "Measuring  the  Work  of  the  Public  Schools  of  Cleveland." 

Russell  Sage  Foundation. 

14.  Kendall  &  Mirick — "How  to  Teach  the  Fundamental  Subjects." 

Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

15.  McMurry,  Chas. — "Conflicting  Principles  of  Teaching."     Hough- 

ton Mifflin  Co. 

16.  McMurry,  F. — "How  to  Study,  and  Teaching  Children  How  to 

Study."     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

17.  "Elementary  School  Standards."     World  Book  Co. 

18.  Monroe's  "Cyclopedia  of  Education."     Macmillan. 


424  THE  CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

19.  Parker — "Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  Schools."     Ginn  &  Co. 

20.  Rapeer — "Teaching  Elementary-School  Subjects." 

21.  Strayer — "The  Teaching  Process."     Macmillan. 

22.  and  Norsworthy — "How  to  Teach."     Macmillan. 

23.  Thorndike — "Education."     Macmillan. 

24.  "Principles  of  Teaching."     Seller. 

25.  Suzzallo  in  Monroe's  "Encyclopedia  of  Education,"  article  on 

Teaching,  Types  of. 

26.  Wilson — "Motivation  of  School  Subjects."     Houghton  Mifflin  Co. 

27.  Yocum — "Culture,    Discipline,    and    Democracy."     Christopher 

Sower  Co. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

THE  COUNTRY  GIRL  AND  THE   CONSOLIDATED 

SCHOOL 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  disadvantages  has  ordinary  country  life  for  girls  and  women? 

2.  What  measures  would  you  propose  for  remedying  these  conditions? 

3.  What  might  a  school  thoroughly  adapted  to  the  needs  of  country 

girls  and  women  do  for  them  that  the  single-room  school  is  not 
doing  ? 

4.  What  organizations  for  girls  and  young  women  have  proved  of  help 

in  the  country? 

5.  What  books  and  magazines  would  you  suggest  for  the  country 

girls  ? 

I.    The  Larger  Outlook 

A  New  Problem — The  Country  Girl. — The  industrial 
history  of  the  last  decade  in  the  United  States  is  marked 
by  the  way  in  which  the  farmer  is  rapidly  coming  into  his 
own;  his  welfare  and  the  cultivation  of  his  broad  acres 
are  receiving  an  unwonted  share  of  public  attention.  The 
government  of  the  United  States  has  assigned,  for  the 
farmer's  welfare,  a  Department  of  Agriculture,  at  the  head 
of  which  is  one  of  the  eight  members  of  the  President's 
Cabinet.  For  the  use  of  this  department  Congress  annually 
appropriates  vast  sums  of  money  and  employs  an  army  of 
experts  and  experimenters.  Probably  no  interest,  indus- 
trial or  commercial,  receives  more  appreciative  attention 
or  more  generous  monetary  assistance  or  has  easier  access 
to  the  ears  of  the  country's  lawmakers  than  that  which 
concerns  the  cultivation  of  the  soil. 

The  teacher  and  the  preacher,  the  lecturer  and  the 
author,  have  helped  sound  the  call  for  the  better  country-life 

425 


426  THE  CONSOLIDATED   RURAL  SCHOOL 

movement,  and  the  farmer  has  been  the  centre  of  interest 
in  it  all.  Next  to  him  in  public  concern  are  the  farm  boys, 
their  clubs,  their  education,  their  training  for  better  farm- 
ing, and  last  but  by  no  means  least,  the  methods  by  which 
the  promising  ones  are  to  be  kept  free  from  the  influence  of 
the  city  attracting  them  away  from  the  farm.  Very  re- 
cently, in  a  corner  of  the  magazine  or  farm  paper,  the  farm 
woman  is  receiving  a  share  of  attention.  The  Department 
of  Agriculture  not  long  ago  started  an  investigation  of  her 
special  needs.  Through  it  all,  even  when  the  spot-light 
centres  on  the  farm  home,  very  little  has  been  said  of  the 
country  girl.  She  has  not  yet  greatly  impressed  the  book 
writers,  the  social  inquirers,  or  the  lecturers  as  a  fitting  sub- 
ject for  investigation.  She  has  as  yet  received  little  inspira- 
tion to  take  her  place  in  the  movement  and  assume  her 
share  in  the  effort  to  find  solutions  for  the  manifold  rural 
problems.  Yet  one  need  not  have  prophetic  vision  to  see 
that  unless  she  assumes  her  portion  of  the  new  responsibili- 
ties and  shares  the  benefits  of  the  new  prosperity  and  the 
advantages  of  the  generous  endowments,  these  services  to 
the  country  can  have  little  permanent  effect.  Only  a  short- 
sighted policy  would  neglect  the  mothers  of  the  race. 

Despite  this  apparent  oversight  on  the  part  of  the  re- 
formers there  are  several  millions  of  country  girls  working 
industriously  and,  let  us  hope,  happily  on  the  farms  of 
America.  They  are  helping  their  mothers  in  the  kitchen 
and  the  household,  not  only  sharing  with  them  the  ^'hewing 
of  wood  and  the  drawing  of  water"  but  too  often  carrying 
both  to  the  remote  kitchen.  They  are  gardening  and  can- 
ning; cooking  and  sewing;  caring  for  the  cows  and  the 
chickens  and  the  younger  children;  sharing  the  barrenness, 
the  drudgery,  the  poverty,  and  the  isolation  of  the  country 
women  in  the  home.  Yet  with  all  this,  it  is  not  the  work 
nor  the  hardship,  difficult  as  it  is,  but  the  systemless,  ob- 
jectless, drudgery;  the  lack  of  appreciation  or  value  placed 
upon  their  contribution  in  the  economic  scheme;    the  con- 


THE  COUNTRY   GIRL  427 

tentment  with  methods  as  they  are,  craving  no  alleviation, 
that  most  tries  their  souls.  It  is  not  strange  that  many 
of  them,  like  their  brothers,  are  drawn  by  the  lure  of  the 
towns  and  the  cities;  for  the  country  girl  shares  the  burdens 
that  fall  to  her  brother  and  receives  relatively  few  of  the 
advantages  the  country-life  movement  is  bringing  to  him. 

II.    What  The  School  Can  Do 

The  Schools  Responsibility. — ^Americans  are  committed 
to  the  belief  that  the  safety  of  the  republic  is  in  the  keeping 
of  the  public  schools.  Instinctively,  almost,  we  look  to 
them  to  carry  out  if  not  to  initiate  the  reforms  we  believe 
necessary  for  our  civic  preservation.  What  more  natural, 
then,  than  our  belief  that  the  ultimate  solution  of  the  rural- 
life  problem  must  come  from  the  rural  school  ?  And  where 
may  we  hope  for  adequate  education  in  the  country  except 
in  the  consolidated  school?  What  then  can  it  offer  to  the 
country  girl  that  she,  too,  may  find  the  possibiHty  for  a 
happy  and  contented  life  on  the  farm;  one  that  satisfies 
the  American  girl's  longing  for  economic  independence 
and  her  craving  for  the  broader  outlook  and  the  abiding 
satisfactions?  What  are  the  causes  of  the  country  girl's 
discontent  and  how  can  the  consolidated  school  help  her 
to  eliminate  them?  What  are  the  limitations  of  her  en- 
vironment, physical,  moral,  and  esthetic,  and  how  can  the 
school  help  her  to  remove  them?  What  can  it  supply 
which  will  add  to  her  possibiUties  for  a  happy  and  serviceable 
life  as  a  country  girl,  and  what  shall  it  offer  to  prepare  her 
for  her  Hfe  work,  whether  it  be  as  a  farm-home  maker  or 
as  a  wage-earner  in  an  industry  or  profession  to  which  her 
inclination  may  lead? 

The  majority  of  women,  whether  in  the  city  or  the 
country,  will  doubtless  continue  to  devote  a  great  portion 
of  their  lives  to  home-making.  But  the  country  girl's 
prospects  for  the  future  should  be  no  narrower  than  her 


428  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

reasonable  hopes  and  desires.  In  the  short  time  that 
women  have  been  permitted  to  take  a  place  in  the  economic 
world  outside  the  home,  few  of  the  gainful  occupations  have 
not  been  successfully  invaded  by  them.  In  all  of  these  the 
countryside  has  been  drawn  upon  to  fill  the  demand  for 
women  of  character,  talent,  and  ability.  There  are  many 
illustrious  examples  to  inspire  the  country  girl.  Jane 
Addams  and  Clara  Barton,  George  Eliot  and  Harriet  Beecher 
Stowe  are  among  the  many  country  girls  who  have  added 
lustre  to  philanthropy  and  literature.  The  recent  war  has 
added  a  whole  new  chapter  to  the  possibility  of  women  in 
all  fields  of  enterprise. 

The  Educational  Scheme. — Before  attempting  to  for- 
mulate a  scheme  for  the  education  of  the  country  girl,  it  is 
well  to  inquire  as  to  her  needs  and  aspirations.  Happiness 
is  a  legitimate  end  of  education;  it  is  the  goal  of  social, 
civic,  and  economic  endeavor.  We  have  been  accustomed 
to  look  upon  the  country  as  the  ideal  rearing-place  for  the 
young;  surely  nature  intended  it  to  be,  and  a  civilization 
which  crushes  or  stifles  its  possibiHties  for  childhood  and 
youth  deprives  them  of  their  richest  inheritance.  But  is 
the  country  girl  happy  in  her  surroundings  and  is  she 
effectively  creating  happiness  for  others?  We  have  had 
our  eyes  opened  of  late  to  the  isolation  of  the  farm  home; 
to  its  lack  of  the  comforts  and  <:onveniences  most  ordinary 
to  the  city  dweller;  to  the  dearth  of  social  intercourse  and 
the  lack  of  recreation  in  the  country,  and  to  the  absence  of 
the  possibilities  for  cultivating  and  satisfying  the  esthetic 
and  spiritual  tastes  of  the  young. 

The  country  girl  during  the  swiftly  changing  years  of 
her  young  womanhood  is  keyed  to  a  higher  emotional 
pitch,  has  a  more  sensitive  nervous  structure,  and  feels 
more  keenly  the  elation  or  depression  of  her  environment 
than  her  brother.  She  is  confined  to  the  house  more 
closely,  has  fewer  activities,  and  less  freedom  and  fewer 
opportunities  for  expressing  her  imaginative  and  emotional 


THE   COUNTRY  GIRL  429 

nature.  She  is  inclined  to  feel  the  full  loneliness  and  dep- 
rivations of  her  environment  and,  unless  wisely  directed, 
even  to  exaggerate  them.  Thus  the  country  girl  is  not 
always  the  happy,  bright-eyed,  care-free,  and  contented 
person  that  we  wish  her  to  be,  and  the  consolidated  school 
may  well  direct  its  efforts  to  help  her  to  achieve  and  create 
individual  and  social  happiness  more  efficiently. 

Health. — The  first  essential  to  happiness  and  service- 
ableness  is  the  achievement  and  conservation  of  buoyant 
vitality  and  perfect  health.  This  should  be  the  heritage  of 
every  country  girl.  Recently,  however,  our  attention  has 
been  called  to  the  lamentable  fact  that  country  children  are 
less  healthful  and  that  more  of  them  suffer  from  preventable 
diseases  than  the  children  of  the  cities.  Round  shoulders, 
narrow  chests,  bad  teeth,  imperfect  eyesight,  and  even 
anemia,  are  common  among  country  girls.  The  drudgery 
of  housework  in  farm  homes  without  modern  conveniences 
for  lightening  it  is  often  too  great  for  their  strength.  The 
physical  labor  of  the  outdoor  work  often  left  to  the  women 
is  too  great  a  tax  on  the  growing  girl.  Insanitary  conditions 
around  the  home,  polluted  water-supply,  lack  of  fresh  air 
in  sleeping-rooms,  the  hardship  of  cold  rooms,  and  long  walks 
over  wet  roads  in  the  winter  time  often  impair  the  health 
of  the  young  girl  who  lives  in  a  home  or  attends  a  school 
in  which  hygienic  regulations  are  not  heeded. 

To  such  as  these  the  consolidated  school  should  open 
the  door  and  point  the  road  to  renewed  health.  This  must 
be  done  in  general  by  the  extension  of  the  school  influence 
into  the  homes  and  among  the  adults  of  the  community. 
It  must  be  done  in  particular  by  systematic  training  of  the 
girl  in  the  school.  Modern  schools  in  the  country  as  well 
as  in  the' city  should  contain  a  gymnasium  with  equipment 
for  physical  exercise,  games,  and  folk-dancing.  The  whole 
health  problem  should  be  in  charge  of  a  physical  director 
who  may,  or  may  not,  devote  part  time  to  regular  courses, 
who  should  have  charge  of  the  instruction  which  the  school 


430  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

offers  in  personal  hygiene,  and  who  should  be  physical  in- 
spector and  adviser  to  the  girls.  The  physical  instructor 
should  be  able  to  devote  some  time  to  work  in  the  com- 
munity, including  visits  to  the  homes  and  lectures  on  home 
and  community  sanitation. 

The  health  of  the  country  girls  is  of  the  utmost  impor- 
tance, not  alone  because  of  their  own  welfare  but  because 
they  are  to  be  the  mothers  of  the  coming  generation.  They 
should,  therefore,  have  careful  instruction  in  all  that  relates 
to  the  acquiring  of  physical  perfection  and  the  preserva- 
tion of  good  health.  Of  what  use  are  the  larger  crops  and 
the  richer  fields  if  the  health  of  the  mothers  and  children 
does  not  justify  their  enjoyment  of  these  benefits? 

Recreation. — Equally  essential  to  the  young  girVs  hap- 
piness is  the  opportunity  for  wholesome  and  enjoyable  recrea- 
tion in  the  society  of  her  friends  and  companions.  Country 
life  in  many  communities  offers  far  too  httle  opportunity 
for  refined  leisure;  the  means  of  enjoyment  and  social  re- 
laxation are  far  too  meagre  to  satisfy  the  yearning  which 
all  young  people  have  for  pleasure.  Too  often  there  is  no 
common  meeting-place  of  easy  access;  there  are  few  forms 
of  entertainment  available  or  accessible  to  the  young  people 
of  the  countryside,  and  this  dearth  of  possibilities  for  social 
intercourse  drives  many  young  girls  to  long  for  and  if  pos- 
sible to  seek  the  more  appealing  and  attractive  amusements 
of  the  near-by  town  or  city.  Here  is  a  great  opportunity 
for  the  consolidated  school  to  fill  the  aspiring  and  hopeful 
hearts  of  the  young  girls  in  the  community  with  wholesome 
happiness.  With  its  gymnasium  for  basket-ball  and  other 
co-operative  social  or  team  games;  for  the  artistic  folk-dances 
of  the  nations;  with  its  auditorium  for  plays,  lectures,  pic- 
tures, musical  and  literary  entertainments,  and  the  like, 
it  can  be  of  inestimable  value  and  enduring  service  to  the 
community.  A  good  swimming  pool  is  especially  desirable 
for  girls  and  women  and  has  proved  its  value  in  many  country 
schools. 


THE  COUNTRY  GIRL  43 1 

These  activities  have  a  social  value  by  no  means  con- 
fined to  amusement.  Character  is  formed  during  one's 
leisure  far  more  than  during  one's  working  hours;  oppor- 
tunity for  civic  and  community  service  usually  occurs  out- 
side the  working  day.  The  habits  for  spending  leisure  in 
noble  and  elevating  or  useful  pursuits,  the  habits  which 
result  in  an  avocation,  are  acquired  in  childhood  and  youth. 
The  woman  is  largely  what  she  has  learned  to  be  during 
the  hours  outside  her  working  time  in  her  youth.  Recrea- 
tion has  a  broad  and  powerful  moral  aspect.  Nearly  every 
girl  has  a  talent  of  some  kind  and  delights  in  expressing 
and  cultivating  it.  If  in  the  arts,  music,  literature,  the 
drama,  painting,  lace-making,  it  may  offer  an  outlook  for 
an  avocation  of  a  highly  profitable  and  pleasurable  nature 
as  well  as  be  a  means  of  culture.  Good  taste  in  amusement 
is  a  bulwark  against  the  temptations  of  the  cheap  theatre, 
the  public  dance-hall,  and  the  sensational  motion-picture 
show.  The  pleasure  of  companionship,  the  friendships 
based  on  mutual  interests  formed  and  fostered  through  the 
social  life  of  young  girls  at  school,  the  little  talents,  the 
special  abilities  that  come  to  hght  during  these  associations, 
are  permanent  sources  of  enjoyment  throughout  adult  Hfe 
as  well  as  in  youth. 

Few  games  or  exercises  give  more  pleasure  or  offer  better 
advantages  for  developing  grace,  lightness,  and  agility  than 
the  beautiful  folk-dances  now  in  vogue  in  city  schools. 
Besides,  they  are  especially  adapted  to  the  country;  they 
originated  among  country  folk  and  express  many  of  the 
ideas  and  emotions  of  the  country  people.  They  should 
have  a  place  on  the  schedule  of  every  consolidated  school 
for  both  boys  and  girls  in  the  lower  grades  and  for  girls 
through  the  high-school  years.  The  folk-dances  are  free, 
vigorous,  wholesome,  modest,  and  graceful,  and  are  the 
best  possible  antidote  for  the  questionable  taste  cultivated 
by  the  ultra-modern  ballroom  dances,  from  which  recent 
wide-spread  interest  not  even  the  remote  country  districts 


432  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

have  altogether  escaped.  Too  many  country  communities 
are  now  confined  to  dancing  for  amusement.  Even  for  these 
the  folk-dances  may  at  least  add  some  variety,  and  new 
standards  of  deportment.  Supervision  and  training  are  es- 
sentials. 

Every  country  girl  should  have  a  knowledge  of  music, 
at  least  enough  to  enable  her  to  enjoy  and  appreciate  it, 
and  she  should  be  familiar  with  some  of  the  masterpieces 
of  music.  She  should  also  know  the  world's  great  pictures 
and  something,  perhaps,  of  the  lives  of  the  artists  who  cre- 
ated them.  The  school  auditorium  should  by  all  means 
have  a  piano  where  the  young  student  pianists  may  have 
the  opportunity  to  express  themselves  through  their  devel- 
oping musical  talent.  There  should  be  a  school  chorus, 
one  or  more  quartets,  and  if  possible  an  orchestra.  Phono- 
graphs are  now  procurable  at  a  relatively  small  cost,  and 
excellent  records,  some  of  great  artists,  can  be  had  to  ac- 
company them.  These  records  reproduce  the  world's 
greatest  musical  selections  and  may  be  had  in  such  variety 
as  to  please  every  kind  of  musical  taste.  The  possession 
of  a  phonograph  with  well-selected  records  not  only  adds  to 
the  pleasure  of  the  girls  at  the  schools  but  offers  an  excel- 
lent method  of  cultivating  their  taste  for  good  music. 

Lightening  Household  Tasks. — The  consoHdated  school 
should  devote  itself  to  freeing  the  farm  woman  from  the 
drudgery  of  an  endless  round  of  monotonous  duties  which 
could  be  avoided  by  the  installation  of  modern  conveniences 
in  the  home.  This  is  the  special  duty  of  the  school  because 
every  subject  in  its  curriculum,  if  related  properly  to  the 
practical  things  concerned  with  the  girl's  life,  will  lead 
directly  to  this  result.  Its  full  accomplishment  may,  and 
probably  will,  mean  educating  the  rural  community  to  better 
methods  of  living  and  more  economical  means  of  working. 
Only  as  country  people  rise  above  monotonous  routine  can 
they  have  an  intellectual  and  spiritual  outlook.  Fortunately, 
there  are  thousands  of  country  girls  gifted  either  by  nature 


THE  COUNTRY  GIRL  433 

or  education  who  love  the  glow  of  the  sunset,  the  songs  of 
the  birds,  the  smell  of  the  fresh  air,  and  the  growing  things, 
and  who  have  the  leisure  and  the  developed  appreciation 
to  enjoy  them.  But  there  are  others,  if  not  an  equal  num- 
ber at  least  the  ''vital  minority"  whose  testimony  Mrs. 
Craw  gives  in  "The  American  Country  Girl,"  who  work 
from  five  o'clock  in  the  morning  until  nine  at  night  in  dull 
routine.  Their  days  are  endless  rounds  of  milking,  churn- 
ing, baking,  dishwashing,  sweeping,  and  carrying  wood 
and  water.  Night  finds  them  too  tired  to  do  more  than 
tumble  "wearily  into  bed  until  the  next  morning."  Their 
work  has  no  intellectual  stimulus,  no  acknowledged  ideal 
purpose.  They  are,  as  Mrs.  Craw  says,  "too  tired  to  go 
out  even  if  there  were  some  place  to  go,  and  too  destitute 
of  initiative  to  seize  on  any  form  of  pleasure." 

The  wave  of  progress  toward  efficient  housekeeping 
which  has  swept  over  the  country  has  not  yet  impressed 
the  country  people.  Labor-saving  devices  for  the  out-of- 
door  work  are  not  matched  by  others  for  within  doors. 
In  some  way  the  farmers  must  be  brought  to  realize  that 
water  piped  into  the  house,  a  lighting  system,  a  heating- 
plant,  a  vacuum  cleaner,  and  similar  labor-lightening  ar- 
rangements are  as  necessary  as  mowing-machines,  separators, 
and  similar  machinery  for  facilitating  the  farm  work.  There 
is  a  home  workshop  as  well  as  an  outdoor  one,  and  neither 
should  be  equipped  entirely  at  the  expense  of  the  other. 
Both  should  be  equipped  well.  The  country  girl  needs  to 
learn  the  value  of  organization;  how  to  systematize  the 
work  of  the  home;  to  keep  accounts  carefully;  to  know  the 
value  of  the  card  catalogue;  in  short,  how  to  conduct  the 
work  of  the  household  on  a  scientific  basis.  Of  still  greater 
importance,  the  country  girl  should  be  educated  to  a  realiza- 
tion of  the  broader  meaning  of  Hfe.  Not  all  the  training  of 
farmers  should  be  concerned  with  growing  better  crops 
and  making  more  money.  Better  living,  especially  for 
those  within  the  homes,  is  of  greater  importance,  if  the  best 


434  THE  CONSOMDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

of  the  young  men  and  women  are  to  be  retained  to  build 
up  the  farms  of  the  future.  For  all  of  these  purposes  the 
school,  through  its  regular  and  special  courses,  is  peculiarly 
adapted  and  every  day  becoming  better  equipped. 

Economic  Independence. — Another  important  factor  in 
the  happiness  of  the  country  girl  is  the  gratification  of  her 
desire  for  economic  independence,  not  necessarily  complete 
independence  but  enough  to  enable  her  to  earn  a  reasonable 
amount  of  spending  money  and  to  have  the  privilege  of 
spending  it  in  her  own  way.  Every  self-respecting  girl 
needs  some  money  and  she  doesn't  want  it  doled  out 
grudgingly  by  the  farmer,  who  had  no  spending-money 
when  he  was  a  boy  and  believes  that  what  he  had  is  good 
enough  for  his  children.  This  type  of  farmer  often  thinks 
that  the  same  type  of  school  he  attended  is  good  enough 
for  his  children.  It  isn't;  times  have  changed  with  the 
young  people's  needs  as  well  as  with  the  instruments  the 
farmer  uses  to  till  the  soil  and  harvest  the  crops.  The 
country  girl  should  be  given  a  fair  money  allowance  for  her 
share  in  the  house  or  farm  work.  Unfortunately,  many 
girls  are  not.  These  girls  the  consolidated  school  can  make 
happier  by  teaching  different  ways  of  making  spending- 
money. 

The  canning  clubs  have  helped  many  girls  to  do  this 
and  have  helped  the  parents  to  appreciate  the  necessity  of 
allowing  their  daughters  to  have  money  in  order  that  they 
may  learn  to  spend  it  wisely.  The  girl  who  has  a  clear 
idea  of  the  value  of  money  and  knows  the  wise  relationship 
between  income  and  expenditure  has  advanced  morally  as 
well  as  economically.  A  significant  story  is  told  of  a  small 
club  girl  in  one  of  the  Southern  States  who  earned  over  a 
hundred  dollars  in  tomato  canning  but  was  not  allowed 
any  of  it  to  spend.  "Pap"  used  it  all,  she  explained  to  the 
club  director.  The  next  year  the  wise  director  sent  out 
cards  for  the  parents'  signature,  exacting  a  promise  that 
the  girls  should  have  the  money  they  made  for  their  own 


Outdoor  group  games  for  girls  at  the  Cache  La  Poudre  consolidated  school 


A  canning-club  girl,  Oregon 


THE  COUNTRY  GIRL  435 

use.  This  father  refused  to  sign,  until  a  letter  from  the  di- 
rector came  explaining  why  the  girl  should  have  the  proceeds 
of  her  work  and  declining  to  admit  her  to  membership 
unless  with  the  promise  that  she  be  given  the  profits.  This 
time  ''Pap"  signed.  There  are  many  other  ways  of  making 
money  which  the  country  girl  could  learn  at  school.  Lace- 
making  or  fine  sewing,  trimming  hats,  laundering  delicate 
waists  and  fine  linens,  supplying  tables  from  the  home  gar- 
den, and  making  jellies  or  home-cooked  foods  are  some 
sources  of  income  now  being  utilized  by  ambitious  country 
girls. 

These  requisites  are  but  the  minimal  essentials  for  the 
country  girls  if  they  are  to  find  happiness  in  the  farm  com- 
munity— health,  recreation,  freedom  from  drudgery,  and 
reasonable  independence.  With  this  accomplished  the  mis- 
sion of  the  consolidated  school  is  not  ended — ^it  is  merely 
begun.  For  it  must  supply  to  the  country  girl  an  education 
which  fits  her  to  carry  her  share  of  the  burden  of  the  new 
movement  for  an  enriched  country  life,  and  it  must  offer 
to  her  a  continuing  source  of  spiritual  inspiration;  and  in- 
tellectual and  social  satisfaction  to  her  successor,  the  farm 
woman. 

Education  for  Life. — What  can  the  consolidated  school 
offer  besides  the  narrow  curriculum  of  the  one-teacher  school 
with  its  many  grades  and  small  classes  and  its  narrow  op- 
portunities for  acquisition  of  culture  and  of  practical  knowl- 
edge to  fit  the  country  girl  for  her  ''place  in  the  sun''  of 
the  new  life  on  the  farm? 

We  have  spoken  above  of  education  for  the  leisure  of 
life,  the  art  subjects,  play,  recreation,  the  joy  of  an  avoca- 
tion, all  of  which  it  should  be  the  privilege  and  responsi- 
bility of  the  consolidated  elementary  and  high  school  to 
supply  to  the  farm  girls.  There  is  also  the  education  in- 
volved in  the  subjects  commonly  known  as  practical,  which, 
with  the  foundation  laid  by  instruction  in  "the  three  R's," 
give  the  girl  an  equipment  which  enables  her  to  make  her 


436  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL  SCHOOL 

own  living  either  in  a  wage-earning  capacity  or  as  a  help- 
mate in  the  home,  according  to  her  circumstances  and 
position  in  life. 

Home-Making. — The  workshop  of  the  woman  is  said 
to  be  the  worst  workshop  in  the  world,  and  nowhere  is  this 
more  true  than  in  the  country.  The  farm  homes  are  the 
last  to  install  electricity,  bathrooms,  and  heating-plants, 
and  the  farmers  the  last  to  profit  by  co-operative  endeavors 
which  make  these  conveniences  possible  at  reasonable  cost. 
The  consolidated  school  will  be  a  great  factor  in  promul- 
gating what  has  already  taken  root  and  in  extending  the 
propaganda  for  better  and  more  convenient  homes  until 
modern  equipment  becomes  as  universally  adopted  in  the 
country  as  in  the  city.  The  farm  girl  must  learn  scientific 
home-keeping,  and  the  school  is  the  place  in  which  to 
teach  it.  As  compared  with  housekeeping,  commercial 
efficiency  is  relatively  easy.  It  is  not  difficult  for  the  expert 
to  standardize  the  movements  involved  in  putting  together, 
say,  the  fifty  parts  of  a  certain  portion  of  the  automobile, 
but  it  is  different,  for  example,  to  standardize  the  making 
of  puff  paste  for  an  apple- tart  or  the  act  of  concocting  an 
old-fashioned  mince  pie.  The  work  of  caring  for  and 
building  up  a  home  is  a  complex  process,  and  teaching  it 
may  involve  the  whole  curriculum.  It  is  economics  chiefly 
— the  income,  the  expenditures;  it  is  simple  mathematics 
very  largely — adding,  subtracting,  and  dividing;  it  is  the 
sciences — all  of  them,  physics,  chemistry,  the  study  of  so- 
ciety and  community  service;  the  arts,  all  of  them — of  ex- 
pression, design,  and  decoration;  it  is  music  and  poetry, 
literature  and  religion;  it  is  all  of  education  and  the  best  of 
life — a  field  quite  big  enough  for  worthy  endeavor  if  there 
were  no  other  demands  for  consideration. 

The  consolidated-school  curriculum  must  organize  all 
of  these  for  school  purposes  in  order  that  the  country  girl 
may  have  the  largest  chance  to  realize  her  fullest  possibili- 
ties.    The  foundation  for  many  of  these  subjects  should  be 


THE  COUNTRY  GIRL  437 

laid  in  the  elementary  school  and  carried  through  as  elec- 
tives  or  required  branches,  according  to  community  require- 
ments, in  the  high  school.  The  best  consolidated  schools 
now  offer  excellent  practical  courses  in  some  or  all  of  the 
following:  household  management;  laundry  work;  cooking 
and  chemistry  of  food;  biology;  house-planning  and  interior 
decoration;  household  and  community  sanitation;  economics; 
nursing;  social  science.  The  majority  of  these  are,  of  course, 
electives.  Household  administration  and  mechanics,  gar- 
dening, poultry,  and  bee-keeping,  are  eminently  practical 
subjects,  and  may  be  offered  for  both  boys  and  girls  in  the 
consolidated  school  equipped  as  it  should  be  with  labora- 
tories, shops,  and  experimental  farm.  The  girl  equipped 
with  a  knowledge  of  any  group  of  home-making  subjects 
in  which  she  can  specialize  according  to  her  ability  and 
which  she  can  continue  through  the  agricultural  college 
will  be  in  little  danger  of  a  monotonous  Hfe.  There  will  be 
for  her  the  joy  in  work  which  comes  from  constantly  meeting 
and  solving  problems  which  test  her  intellect,  what  Pro- 
fessor Fiske  calls  the  '^challenge  of  the  difficult." 

The  minimal  training  which  the  country  girl  should  have 
for  home-keeping  should  include  plain  sewing,  cookery,  the 
study  of  foods,  household  accounting,  home  decoration,  and 
sanitation.  With  a  knowledge  of  these  essentials,  a  devel- 
oped intellect,  and  a  desire  to  grow,  the  country  girl  should 
find  happiness  and  a  Hfe  of  service  in  her  farm  home. 

Other  Vocations. — The  consolidated  school  will  also 
include  among  its  duties  the  responsibility  of  preparing 
young  women  for  the  vocations.  Not  all  country  girls  will 
wish  to  remain  in  the  country;  not  all  of  them  to  prepare 
to  be  housekeepers.  The  high  school  in  the  country, 
through  differentiation  of  courses  and  by  offering  a  wide 
range  of  electives,  may  at  least  start  the  girls  on  some  wage- 
earning  vocation  of  their  choice  and  for  which  they  are 
fitted  by  natural  ability.  There  are  a  variety  of  occupations 
from  which  to  choose,  a  foundation  for  which  can  be  laid 


438  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

in  the  country  high  school.  A  few  are  suggested  in  the 
enumeration  of  subjects  for  home-making  courses,  for  ex- 
ample, nursing,  home  decoration,  gardening.  Many  young 
women  with  talent  for  any  of  these  find  pleasant  and  profita- 
ble employment  in  their  home  neighborhood,  or  in  the  cities 
of  the  county. 

Teaching  offers  an  attractive  field  to  many  young  women 
who  feel  the  call  for  work  which  involves  the  missionary 
spirit.  Many  forces  are  now  at  work  for  the  upbuilding  of 
rural  schools  and  for  improving  salaries,  living  conditions, 
and  school  housing  in  rural  districts.  This  field  ought  to 
have  a  peculiar  attraction  for  the  country  girl  with  a  spirit 
of  loyalty  to  the  soil  and  a  sympathetic  insight  into  the 
needs  of  rural  life.  Rural-school  work  is  a  splendid  field  for 
service,  and  the  regular  academic  courses  in  the  consolidated 
school  admit  directly  to  the  first-grade  normal  schools, 
where  the  country  girl  should  specialize  by  taking  at  least 
her  major  courses  in  the  department  of  rural  education. 

For  those  girls  with  talent  in  music  or  art,  the  consoli- 
dated school  can  offer  intelligent  direction  and  an  oppor- 
tunity for  enlarged  appreciation.  To  those  who  wish  to 
enter  business — to  be  stenographers,  clerks,  milliners,  dress- 
makers, or  enter  other  commercial  pursuits — the  school  may, 
if  it  is  large  enough,  offer  special  courses.  It  can  at  least 
foster  the  talent  for  these  which  girls  among  its  pupils 
possess,  and  advise  and  assist  them  in  regard  to  further 
training,  and  it  can  help  them  in  selecting  the  courses  which 
will  be  most  serviceable  when  they  enter  industrial  life. 
For  example,  the  girl  who  plans  to  be  a  stenographer  and 
typist  needs  all  the  English,  composition,  Hterature,  spelling, 
social  science,  history,  and  current  events  which  the  school 
can  give,  at  the  expense  of  such  courses  as  algebra,  German, 
Latin,  French,  and  perhaps  even  the  ordinary  old-line 
physics.  Similar  emphasis  and  eliminations  are  possible 
for  girls  preparing  for  other  occupations. 


THE  COUNTRY  GIRL  439 

III.     Associated  Activities 

The  Teachers'  Cottage. — Each  year  sees  additional  rural- 
school  plants  equipped  with  the  teachers'  cottage  or  teacher- 
age.  Its  use  came  about  because  of  the  necessity  of  pro- 
viding better  homes  for  rural  teachers  than  the  community 
in  many  instances  afforded,  the  desirability  of  securing 
permanent  rather  than  itinerant  teachers,  and  because 
there  is  general  agreement  that  a  revised  curriculum  which 
embodies  the  material  suited  to  the  needs  of  rural  communi- 
ties requires  that  the  school  grounds  be  cared  for  through 
the  summer  months.  But  the  cottage  was  so  obviously 
useful  for  demonstration  purposes  and  as  a  model  example 
in  good  housekeeping  for  the  community  and  as  the  labora- 
tory for  study  of  the  household  arts  and  sciences  that  its 
function  is  rapidly  being  extended.  In  many  instances 
the  teachers'  cottage  is  serving  the  schools'  girls  as  it  should 
practical  training  in  household  work  of  every  nature — fur- 
nishing, decorating,  sanitation,  cooking,  sewing,  and  the 
allied  branches. 

Whether  the  cottage  is  the  home  of  the  principal  or  super- 
intendent and  his  family,  or,  as  in  many  instances,  it  serves 
as  a  co-operative  housekeeping  plant  for  several  teachers, 
its  hospitaUty  should,  from  time  to  time,  be  extended  to  the 
pupils  of  the  school.  This,  of  course,  is  applicable  chiefly 
to  high  school,  because  pupils  of  high-school  age  are  most 
susceptible  to  the  influence  of  the  social  graces  and  con- 
ventionalities of  refined  entertainment  and  the  virtues  of 
unobtrusive,  unaffected,  and  wholesome  hospitaUty.  The 
teachers'  cottage  is,  of  course,  expected  to  be  only  the 
background  for  the  class,  club,  or  school  affairs,  the  pupils 
themselves  acting  as  hosts  and  hostesses  and  assuming  the 
responsibility  of  any  decoration,  entertainment,  and  re- 
freshments, or  the  like,  as  are  desirable  for  the  occasion. 
The  arrangements  should  not  be  elaborate  except  in  very 
special  cases,  but  should  emphasize  the  unassuming  nature 
of  genuine  social  gradousness. 


440  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Social  Activities. — The  American  high  school  has  been 
defined  as  the  people's  college,  and  the  consolidated  high 
school  must  surely  realize  this  function.  Not  only  should  it 
educate  the  young  people  of  the  country,  but  it  must  serve 
as  their  centre  of  social  relaxation  and  be  a  continuation 
and  extension  school  for  all  the  community.  Many  con- 
solidated rural  high  schools  are  now  realizing  all  of  these 
functions.  They  are  advisory  and  experimental  stations 
and  social  meeting-places,  not  alone  for  farmers  and  their 
wives,  but  for  the  farm  girls  who  have  finished  school,  or 
those  who  have  been  deprived  of  the  opportunity  to  attend 
school.  The  consolidated  school  should  have  a  circulating 
library,  either  on  its  own  accord  or  serve  as  station  and  dis- 
tributing centre  for  the  country  or  town  library.  A  school 
which  fosters  a  love  for  good  reading  and  supplies  the  books 
is  a  high  type  of  continuation  school.  The  services  of  a 
travelling  instructor  in  home  economics,  made  possible  by 
the  Smith-Lever  Act,  can  be  placed  at  the  disposal  of  enter- 
prising rural  communities,  and  what  place  is  more  fitting 
or  so  well  equipped  for  lecture  and  demonstration  work  as 
the  laboratory  or  kitchen  or  demonstration  cottage  of  the 
consolidated  school?  Sewing  classes  or  clubs,  gardening 
clubs,  or  groups  interested  in  any  phase  of  practical  or  cul- 
tural education  may  meet  in  the  social  rooms  of  the  consoli- 
dated school  for  conference  and  improvement,  and  enjoy 
the  advice  and  counsel  of  the  specialists  engaged  by  the 
school,  or  of  visitors  who  can  be  brought  there  for  special 
occasions.  Such  meetings  give  an  opportunity  for  the  de- 
velopment of  leadership,  which  is  needed  among  country 
women  as  well  as  men.  The  regular  courses  of  the  school, 
the  games  and  social  organizations  are  all  fitted  to  train  for 
the  leadership  which  should  manifest  itself  later  in  the 
adult  groups. 

The  school  auditorium  should  be  used  for  community 
singing  for  adults  as  well  as  for  school  children,  and  by  a 
community  orchestra,  where  one  can  be  organized,  under 


THE  COUNTRY  GIRL  44I 

the  directorship  of  local  or  imported  musicians.  Branches 
of  such  organizations  as  Y.  W.  C.  A.,  Girl  Scouts,  women's 
section  of  the  International  Congress  for  Farm  Women, 
Camp-Fire  Girls,  and  the  like,  may  be  formed  among  the 
young  women  in  and  out  of  school,  with  the  schoolhouse 
as  a  meeting-place.  The  Y.  W.  C.  A.  has  taken  a  serious 
interest  in  the  life  of  the  country  girls,  has  organized  many 
clubs  among  them,  and  provides  special  workers  for  rural 
districts. 

We  have  previously  discussed  the  social  possibilities  of 
the  school  auditorium,  and  all  that  has  been  said  of  its 
necessity  in  behalf  of  the  country  girl  appHes  equally  to 
the  farm  woman.  The  musicals  and  dramatizations,  en- 
tertainments, the  lectures  and  picture-shows  form  another 
phase  of  her  continuation  school,  and  also  supply  social  in- 
tercourse and  refined  amusement.  No  one  needs  this  re- 
laxation more  than  she,  for  on  the  isolated  farm  she  is  usually 
the  most  lonesome  person.  Her  work  is  the  most  monoto- 
nous and  her  monetary  rewards  at  least  the  most  meagre. 
These  will  be  dealt  with  in  the  next  chapter.  Great  are  the 
possibilities  of  the  consolidated  school  for  the  country  girl ! 
It  can  fit  her  for  a  happy  and  useful  life  in  her  chosen  field 
of  endeavor.  It  can  bring  to  her  when  her  school  life  is 
over  the  fulness  of  culture  from  the  outside  world  and  the 
richness  of  life's  most  abiding  satisfactions. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  Make  a  list  of  difficulties  which  farm  women  face  that  could  be 

better  met  by  means  of  improved  home  education  in  consoli- 
dated schools. 

2.  Secure  Dr.  Lumsden's  bulletin  No.  94  from  the  U,  S.  Public  Health 

Service  on  "Rural  Sanitation,"  and  from  it  make  up  a  list  of 
things  that  an  organized  group  of  girls  and  women  could  do  for 
health  in  a  consolidated  district. 

3.  Secure  Evelyn  Dewey's  book  on  "New  Schools  for  Old,"  published 

by  Dutton  &  Co.,  New  York,  and  from  a  close  reading  of  it  make 


442  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

4.  Secure  one  or  more  of  the  surveys  of  rural  life  by  the  Presbyterian 

Board  of  Home  Missions,  and  list  in  a  note-book  the  principal 
needs  of  the  country  women  surveyed  and  the  suggestions  made 
for  meeting  these  needs.  What  applications  of  these  surveys 
can  you  make  to  a  typical  rural  district  with  which  you  are  ac- 
quainted ? 

5.  Read  Crowe's  "The  American  Country  Girl,"  given  in  the  bibliog- 

raphy below.  What  phases  of  the  volume  impress  you  as  most 
helpful  and  practical  ? 

6.  Make  a  list  of  the  chief  "modern  conveniences"  needed  in  most 

country  homes  for  making  the  life  of  the  farm  woman  less  of  a 
burden.  How  much  would  these  cost  to  introduce  into  a  typical 
country  home  in  your  section  ?  What  would  be  the  best  methods 
of  securing  them  ? 

7.  What  subjects  which  country  girls  study  could  best  be  displaced 

by  other  subject-matter  and  training?  What  phases  of  elemen- 
tary and  high-school  work  are  usually  of  little  comparative  value 
to  country  girls  and  prospective  mothers  and  managers  of  house- 
holds? What  subjects  should  girls  be  taught  separately  from 
boys  in  the  consolidated  school  ? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Allen,  W.  H.— "Woman's  Part  in  Government."    Dodd,  Mead 

&Co. 

2.  Bailey,  L.  H. — "Woman's  Contribution  to  the  Country-Life  Move- 

ment," in  his  "The  Country-Life  Movement  in  the  United 
States."    The  Macmillan  Co.     • 

3.  "Woman's  Place  in  a  Scheme  of  Agricultural  Education," 

in  his  "New  York  State  Problems."    J.  B.  Lyon  Co.,  Albany, 
N.  Y. 

4.  Broadhurst,  Jean — "Home  and  Community  Hygiene."    Lippin- 

cott. 

5.  Butterfield,   K.   L. — "Opportunities  for  Farm  Women,"  in  his 

"Chapters  in  Rural  Progress."    University  of  Chicago  Press. 

6.  Cabot,  Ella  L.— "Volunteer  Work  in  the  Schools."    Houghton 

Mifflin  Co. 

7.  Carver,  T.  N. — "Principles  of  Rural  Economics."     Ginn  &  Co. 

8.  Crowe,  Martha  F.— "The  American  Country  Girl."     Stokes  Co. 

9.  Denison,  Elsie — "Helping  School  Children."     Dodd,  Mead  &  Co. 

10.  Dewey,  Evelyn — "New  Schools  for  Old" — the  story  of  Mrs.  Har- 

vey's noteworthy  work  for  the  Porter  School.     Dutton  &  Co. 

11.  Field,  Jessie — "The  Corn  Lady."     Flanagan. 


THE  COUNTRY  GIRL  443 

12.  McKeever,  W.  A. — "Farm  Boys  and  Girls."     The  Macmillan  Co. 

13.  Presbyterian  Board  of  Home  Missions — "Rural-life  surveys  of  a 

number  of  typical  counties  in  the  United  States."    New  York. 

14.  Quick,  Herbert— "The  Brown  Mouse."     Bobbs-Merrill  Co. 

15.  "The  Fairview  Idea."     Bobbs-Merrill  Co. 

16.  Richards,  F.  H.— "Hygiene  for  Girls."     D.  C.  Heath  &  Co. 

17.  Vogt,  Paul— "Rural  Sociology."    The  Macmillan  Co. 


CHAPTER  XX 
RURAL  RECREATION  AND   CONSOLIDATION 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  part  does  the  lack  of  suitable  recreation  and  wholesome  en« 

joyment  play  in  the  reasons  given  by  our  youth  for  leaving  the 
farm  ? 

2.  What  types  of  recreation  are  common  in  the  part  of  the  coimtry 

with  which  you  are  most  familiar? 

3.  What  types  could  well  be  added? 

4.  How  do  you  account  for  a  very  common  antagonism  to  play  and 

recreation,  and  especially  to  organized  purposeful  effort  to  pro- 
mote it  in  the  country? 

5.  What  are  the  verdicts  of  the  Roosevelt  Country-Life  Commission, 

the  National  Country-Life  Association,  and  other  organizations 
and  surveys  respecting  avocational  efficiency  in  the  country? 

I.    Problems  of  Avocational  Efficiency 

In  an  analysis  of  social  efficiency  into  the  five  great 
aims  of  education,  namely,  vital,  vocational,  avocational, 
civic,  and  moral  efficiency,  we  can  see  that  one  of  the  great 
purposes  always  to  be  held  before  a  system  of  public  schools 
is  that  of  promoting  avocational  efficiency.  ''The  right  use 
of  leisure"  is  one  of  the  great  aims  of  life,  and  one  of  the 
leading  problems  of  life  is  to  use  wisely  and  well  the  leisure 
period.  For  most  workers  in  our  country  the  eight-hour 
daily  period  of  work  is  becoming  standard.  One  of  our 
state  superintendents  of  public  instruction  made  an  address 
not  many  years  ago  in  which  he  spoke  vigorously  against 
granting  the  eight-hour  day  to  laborers,  because  it  gave 
them  too  much  leisure.  He  argued  that  it  is  necessary  first 
to  train  people  to  use  their  leisure  wisely  if  they  are  to  be 

444 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION  445 

granted  much  freedom  from  toil.  To  throw  open  suddenly- 
large  periods  of  the  day  for  a  great  population  that  has  not 
previously  been  trained  to  use  this  leisure  well  would  only 
mean  the  degradation  of  that  people. 

On  the  farm  the  period  of  leisure  is  just  as  important  as 
in  the  city,  but  cannot  always  be  provided  for  in  the  same 
way  that  it  is  there.  It  must  come  more  according  to 
seasons  rather  than  being  provided  for  during  each  day 
perhaps;  but  Sundays  and  winters,  Saturday  half-holidays, 
and  other  times  are  available  for  considerable  recreation. 

The  ordinary  attitude  of  a  great  many  people  in  this  coun- 
try is  that  time  not  spent  in  work  or  sleep  is  largely  wasted. 
They  look  upon  play  as  something  unnecessary.  They  con- 
sider work  the  big  important  thing  in  which  one  can  engage 
in  this  world.  Little  preparation  or  thought  is  given  to 
recreation,  to  wholesome  enjoyment,  to  the  right  use  of 
leisure;  and  the  consequences  to  individual  and  social 
welfare  are  not  good. 

Let  us  examine  this  ordinary  attitude  and  point  of  view 
and  see  if  it  is  sound,  either  philosophically  or  historically. 
What  is  the  goal  of  life,  anyway  ?  For  what  are  we  living  ? 
Are  we  *'here  because  we're  here,''  as  the  boys  in  college 
sometimes  sing,  or  can  we  see  some  deeper  motive  and 
purpose  in  Hfe?  Most  persons  who  have  not  thought  on 
the  problem  answer  very  vaguely,  indefinitely,  and  unsatis- 
factorily when  confronted  by  this  question.  The  answers 
are  various  and  often  self-contradictory.  They  are  un- 
satisfactory both  to  the  one  who  makes  them  and  to  the 
examiner. 

The  best  answer  we  can  give  to  this  question,  to  state 
the  matter  briefly,  is  that  the  goal  of  living  is  individual 
and  social  happiness.  Christ  said,  you  will  remember:  "I 
came  that  ye  might  have  Hfe,  and  that  more  abundantly." 
The  goal  of  living  is  living,  as  our  very  instincts  tell  us.  To 
make  this  living  more  abundant,  richer,  and  happier  is  the 
goal  of  all  of  our  endeavors.     We  engage  in  work  for  the 


446  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

purpose  of  making  happier  and  better  our  daily  living. 
We  must  make  work  as  much  as  possible  a  direct  means  to 
happiness  through  the  democracy  of  industry,  but  this  is 
of  itself  entirely  insufficient.  We  are  not  living  a  Hfe  of 
slavery  and  toil  in  order  to  prepare  for  some  distant  future  life 
beyond  the  grave.  The  only  way  to  prepare  for  a  future 
life  is  to  live  well  this  life.  Education  is  not  a  preparation 
merely  for  a  life  to  come  when  the  individual  is  an  adult; 
it  is  life  here  and  now,  and  the  child  has  just  as  much  a 
right  to  and  need  of  happiness  in  his  child's  life  as  he  will 
ever  have;  and  the  best  way  to  help  him  to  promote  the 
greatest  happiness  as  an  adult  is  to  give  him  training  in 
attaining  and  promoting  happiness  as  a  child. 

There  are  two  extreme  points  of  view  with  respect  to 
this  matter.  There  are  first  those  who  make  the  individual 
and  his  pleasure  the  centre  of  all  efforts,  and  fail  to  train 
him  to  get  his  pleasure  and  recreation  in  a  manner  that  pro- 
motes the  highest  social  good.  On  the  other  hand,  we  have 
the  Spartan-like  philosophy,  in  which  the  individual  is  sub- 
merged and  subjected  to  the  demands  of  the  state.  He  is 
put  into  a  machine  and  made  to  conform  with  no  regard  to 
his  own  individual  pleasure,  but  to  the  needs  and  demands 
of  the  social  system.  Neither  one  of  these  attitudes  is  cor- 
rect. The  only  true  social  philosophy  is  the  philosophy  that 
finds  the  goal  of  life  in  the  processes  of  normal,  happy,  effi- 
cient social  living.  It  is  to  promote  this  that  schools  and 
all  other  social  institutions  are  founded.  We  work  not  to 
discipline  our  souls,  nor  to  pile  up  money;  we  work  to  pro- 
mote life  more  abundant — a  richer,  happier,  better  living, 
not  only  for  the  individual,  but  for  all  humanity;  and  not 
merely  for  our  nation,  but  for  all  nations. 

On  the  psychological  side  we  see  that  the  expression  of 
the  inherited  tendencies  and  instincts  with  which  people 
are  born  usually  have  as  their  emotional  accompaniments 
happiness  and  pleasure;  but  since  we  live  among  a  congested 
world  of  people,  and  since  these  instincts  were  developed 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND   CONSOLIDATION  447 

for  a  very  primitive  type  of  life,  it  is  necessary  for  us  to 
guide  these  instincts  along  lines  of  habit  and  efficiency  that 
will  promote  the  greatest  human  welfare. 

The  best  kind  of  social  life  is  that  which  provides  for 
the  most  harmonious  expression  of  the  natural  instincts  of 
the  individual,  for  only  along  these  lines  shall  we  obtain 
the  greatest  amount  and  finest  quality  of  individual  and 
social  happiness.  There  is  no  finer  sight  in  the  world  than 
to  see  the  happy,  joyous  pleasures  of  children  at  play. 
The  satisfactions  of  the  instincts  of  construction,  of  rhythm, 
of  communication,  of  curiosity,  of  mental  and  physical  ac- 
tivity, are  among  the  greatest  pleasures  of  life.  In  the 
innocent  recreations  and  enjoyments  of  living  we  attain 
the  goal  of  life  very  immediately  and  very  directly.  Most 
of  us  would  spend  more  time  in  recreation  than  we  do,  but 
usually  as  we  grow  older  ''the  prison  house  of  flesh  begins  to 
close  us  in."  We  get  bound  up  in  the  habits  of  our  daily 
work,  and  we  become  so  changed  that  we  are  hardly  normal 
individuals.  It  is  necessary  for  us  to  preserve  our  normality; 
it  is  necessary  for  us  to  remain  young  and  to  keep  the 
youthful  point  of  view.  It  is  highly  desirable  that  we  get 
more  happiness  and  thorough  enjoyment  in  life  very  im- 
mediately and  directly,  if  we  can  get  it,  both  in  our  work 
and  apart  from  our  work.  We  must  become  as  little  children 
if  we  would  enter  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven. 

Historically,  it  is  very  interesting  to  see  how  the  com- 
monly held  attitude  toward  recreation  in  this  country  has 
come  about.  The  American  people  have  been  (i)  a  pioneer 
people  hard  up  against  the  struggle  for  existence.  They 
have  been  (2)  a  Puritan  people,  a  people  inheriting  a  form 
of  theology  that  is  a  direct  outcome  of  the  medieval  world, 
and  the  doctrines  of  other-worldly-ism  and  asceticism.  We 
are  the  lineal  descendants  of  people  who  were  extremists 
along  these  lines  and  protested  against  the  levities  of  the 
upper  classes  in  the  old  world. 

The  attitude  of  mind  that  our  forefathers  brought  here 


448  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

and  which  became  the  common  public  opinion  of  this  coun- 
try was,  first,  that  of  middle-age  asceticism.  Very  largely 
this  old  attitude  was  that  man,  instead  of  coming  from  the 
hands  of  his  creator  pure  and  undefiled,  as  it  was  claimed, 
was  naturally  depraved  and  vicious,  that  all  his  instinctive 
tendencies  and  emotional  delights  were  debased  and  wrong, 
and  that  the  only  way  by  which  one  could  climb  up  to 
real  spiritual  perfection  was  to  subjugate,  repress,  and  drive 
out  his  instinctive  tendencies.  Those  who  went  to  extremes 
along  these  Unes  strove  to  repress  and  kill  their  most  funda- 
mental and  personal  instincts.  The  monks  and  nuns  of 
the  old  monasteries  and  nunneries,  and  many  others  follow- 
ing them,  as  you  know,  swore  the  vows  of  poverty,  obedi- 
ence, and  chastity. 

One  of  these  companies  of  people,  for  example,  were  the 
group  of  religious  zealots  who  came  to  Pennsylvania  and 
founded  the  village  of  Harmony,  and  later  the  village  of 
New  Harmony  in  Indiana,  and  still  later  the  village  of 
Economy  in  western  Pennsylvania.  They  practised  the 
doctrine  of  celibacy,  and  of  course  gradually  and  inevitably 
perished  from  the  face  of  the  earth.  No  more  surely  does 
some  other  kind  of  death  ensue  from  the  attempt  to  destroy 
by  repression  almost  any  other  of  the  natural  instinctive 
human  tendencies.  But  these  are  the  traditions  and  habits 
of  mind  which  we  inherit,  and  which  dominate,  especially, 
our  country  people. 

This  philosophy  made  a  school  system,  a  government,  a 
church,  a  family  life,  and  all  other  types  of  life  too  repres- 
sive, unattractive,  and  unhappy. 

The  Puritans. — Those  who  have  given  us  most  of  our 
traditions  were  not  only  ascetics  to  a  degree,  but  also  Puri- 
tans. The  Puritans  were  so  sure  in  their  beliefs,  so  vigorous 
in  their  dissent  from  the  rather  happy-go-lucky  laws  and 
Hcenses  of  the  upper  classes  of  England,  that  they  were 
willing  to  give  up  home  and  country,  and  brave  the  dangers 
of  an  Atlantic  voyage  and  the  privations  and  the  enemies 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION  449 

of  a  new  world  to  carry  out  their  puritanical  principles. 
The  old  "blue  laws"  of  the  East,  under  which  a  man  could 
be  thrown  into  prison  for  whistling  on  Sunday,  or  a  young 
couple  punished  for  conversing  together  on  Sunday,  in  which 
the  burning  of  witches  and  other  forms  of  narrow-minded 
persecution  and  self-punishment  were  legalized,  are  all  evi- 
dences of  this  type  of  mind.  It  led  to  that  horrible,  narrow- 
minded  monstrosity  which  we  call  the  New  England  con- 
science and  which  has  been  so  often  described  to  us  and 
held  up  to  our  horror  by  literary  men. 

Effects  of  Pioneer  Life. — Secondly,  we  have  the  habits 
and  customs  established  by  our  pioneer  forefathers  still 
with  us.  They  came  here  and  left  their  folk-dances,  games 
and  pastimes,  and  recreations  of  the  old  world  behind  them. 
They  entered  into  the  wilderness  of  woods  and  rocks,  and 
hardships;  they  fought  the  Indians  and  conquered  nature. 
They  lived  a  hard  life,  a  serious  struggle  for  existence.  It 
was  necessary  for  them  in  many  cases  to  cut  out  of  their 
lives  much  or  most  that  people  had  held  as  a  normal  part  of 
living,  a  reasonable  amount  of  recreation,  hoping  that  thereby 
they  would  provide  homes  and  settled  abodes  and  the  com- 
forts that  would  enable  their  children  or  their  children's 
children  to  have  what  they  denied  themselves.  But  they 
overlooked  the  great  principles  of  social  custom,  social  tradi- 
tion, and  social  habit.  These  things  eliminated  recreations 
from  the  population  and  left  little  or  nothing  in  their  places. 
The  habits  of  working  as  many  hours  a  day  as  there  was 
daylight  became  a  fixed  rule  and  custom.  In  his  home 
country,  the  Enghshman  stops  his  work  at  four  o'clock  in 
the  afternoon,  has  his  tea,  and  goes  out  and  plays  his  game 
of  cricket  as  a  regular  part  of  the  day's  activities.  He  re- 
gards recreation  and  the  right  use  of  leisure  as  a  highly 
essential  part  of  life,  second  to  none  in  importance.  These 
customs  and  these  traditions  have  here  all  been  forgotten, 
and  the  average  farmer  to-day  in  the  United  States  accepts 
this  social  custom  with  respect  to  recreation  as  his  mental 
heritage. 


450  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

If  we  are  going  to  build  up  the  right  use  of  leisure  and 
normal  amount  of  wholesome  enjoyment  and  recreation 
among  country  people,  we  must  start  with  the  more  unbiassed 
children  in  the  public  schools  and  cultivate  in  them  a  re- 
spect for  these  things,  and  train  them  how  to  use  their 
leisure  wisely,  and  how  to  achieve  real  avocation^l  efficiency. 
Certainly  the  life  which  is  now  lived  does  not  promote  the 
highest  type  of  living;  it  does  not  make  for  the  attainment 
of  the  goal  of  life,  for  which  we  all  more  or  less  bhndly  strive. 

Why  Do  the  Boys  and  Girls  Leave  the  Farm?  Why 
do  they  crowd  into  the  cities?  Why  do  they  leave  the  old 
folks  and  "break  home  ties"  ?  On  the  farm  they  would  usu- 
ally obtain  a  good  start  in  life,  very  often  a  farm  of  their 
own  to  till,  property  of  their  own  which  they  probably  will 
never  get  in  the  city.  They  have  the  habits  that  enable 
them  to  succeed  on  the  farm,  whereas  in  the  city  they  will 
have  to  learn  a  new  industrial  trade  or  profession.  Out  on 
the  farm  they  have  all  of  nature  over  which  they  may 
roam,  the  most  dehghtful  place  in  which  to  live  that  could 
be  conceived,  and  yet  they  turn  their  backs  on  it  and  go 
to  the  dusty,  smoky,  dirty  city,  and  live  for  years  in  a  hall 
bedroom,  taking  small  wages  for  their  indoor  toil,  and  pay- 
ing out  all  or  most  of  what  they  earn  for  the  bare  necessi- 
ties of  living. 

The  desires  for  novelty  and  for  change  and  variety  will 
account  for  much  of  this  migration.  Many  of  the  city  boys 
wish  to  go  to  the  farm,  and  in  many  cases  we  find  in  our 
agricultural  schools  and  colleges  that  a  large  number  of 
the  students  are  city-bred.  In  some  cases,  too,  there  is  no 
good  opening  on  the  farm  any  more  for  one  or  more  of  the 
children  of  a  large  family.  In  other  cases  the  children's 
natural  tendencies  and  abilities  are  very  clearly  away  from 
the  farm,  and  toward  business  or  professional  life  in  the 
city.  But  even  after  we  eliminate  all  of  these  and  many 
more,  we  have  accounted  for  only  a  small  proportion  of  the 
boys  and  girls  who  leave  the  farm.     When  we  follow  them 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION  45 1 

up  and  ask  them  what  it  was  that  they  disliked  on  the 
farm  they  usually  reply:    ''There  was  nothing  doing." 

They  mean  by  this  that  they  have  not  the  same  oppor- 
tunity for  the  satisfaction  of  their  various  instincts  and  for 
the  normal  human  delights  and  pleasures  which  youths  so 
naturally  and  rightfully  claim;  and  it  is  probably  this 
failure  to  provide  opportunity  for  plenty  of  wholesome  en- 
joyment on  the  farm,  as  much  as  almost  any  other  cause, 
that  has  led  to  the  tremendous  stream  from  country  to 
city.  Whereas  in  1790  but  3  per  cent  of  our  population 
lived  in  cities,  to-day  50  per  cent  of  the  people  of  the  nation 
live  in  these  small  spots  scattered  over  the  surface  of  the 
whole  United  States — in  some  cases  gathering  together  in 
great  congested  hordes,  living  like  cliff-dwellers,  one  over 
the  other,  in  cities  of  one  to  several  millions. 

The  cost  of  farm  products,  of  foodstuffs,  and  of  living  has 
steadily  gone  up  for  a  number  of  years.  There  is  a  great 
economic  opportunity  on  the  farm;  scientific  agriculture 
is  making  it  possible  to  do  much  that  never  could  have 
been  done  in  the  past;  but  still  our  boys  and  girls  continue 
to  leave. 

In  the  city,  recreation  has  been  exploited.  Many  who 
have  seen  this  natural  hunger  of  the  young  (and  of  the  old) 
to  obtain  the  natural  and  normal  instinctive  delights  and 
satisfactions  have  provided  amusements  of  one  kind  or 
another  in  manifold  profusion,  and  have  charged  people  for 
the  privilege  of  enjoying  them.  The  public  dance-hall,  the 
theatre,  the  motion-picture,  the  bowling-alley,  the  billiard 
and  pool  hall,  the  saloon,  roller  and  ice  skating  rinks,  the 
dime  museum,  the  "slide  for  life,"  and  a  thousand  and  one 
other  "attractions"  have  all  been  cunningly  devised  to 
furnish  a  certain  kind  of  excitement  and  stimulation  of  in- 
stinctive tendencies  in  such  a  way  as  to  provide  for  the  pro- 
moters of  these  recreations  the  greatest  amount  of  money. 
To  bring  in  the  most  money  they  have  made  their  appeals 
usually  to  the  strongest  and  most  fundamental  instincts, 


452  THE  CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

in  many  cases  in  such  ways  as  to  injure  people  as  much,  or 
more,  than  they  have  helped  them  through  providing  the 
recreation. 

The  dance-hall  and  the  saloon  and  den  of  vice  have  readily 
become  connected.  The  recreations  are  carried  on  fre- 
quently in  ill- ventilated  and  unwholesome  rooms.  In  most 
cases  they  are  entirely  sedentary,  the  people  who  have  been 
seated  around  their  indoor  tasks  all  day  going  to  indoor 
sedentary  recreations  at  night.  The  baseball  game  is  par- 
ticipated in  only  by  crowding  on  stuffy  street-cars  and  by 
sitting  on  the  bleachers,  not  in  playing  the  game.  The 
cities  have  allowed  mercenary  individuals  for  the  sake  of 
the  game  to  exploit,  and  in  many  cases  to  degrade,  the  young 
people  of  our  land  who  should  have  been  provided  normal 
wholesome,  social  recreation  through  some  other  agencies. 

Certainly  it  is  true  that  if  country  people  had  held  differ- 
ent notions  of  the  importance  of  avocations  and  had  be- 
stirred themselves  to  provide  for  them,  there  would  be 
to-day  far  more  happiness  both  in  the  country  and  in  the 
city.  The  problems  of  recreation  are  to  discover  the  best 
forms,  to  socialize  them,  and  to  get  all  people  to  participate 
reasonably  in  recreation  of  the  forms  which  they  most  need. 

II.    Surveys  of  Recreation 

A  great  awakening  has  taken  place  in  the  United  States 
in  the  last  few  years  with  respect  to  this  great  avocational 
problem.  Never  before,  probably,  in  the  history  of  the 
world  have  people  so  suddenly  realized  that  the  goal  of  life 
is  not  ''the  getting  of  a  little  more  land  to  raise  a  little  more 
wheat,  to  get  a  little  more  money,  to  buy  a  little  more 
land";  that  it  is  not  a  vicious  circle  of  money-making,  nor 
merely  the  getting  of  property,  but  that  it  is  normal  growth 
and  happiness,  the  enrichment  and  refinement  of  living 
itself.  But  a  few  years  ago,  nearly  all  of  the  recreations 
of  the  nation  were  in  the  cities,  and  these  under  private 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND   CONSOLIDATION  453 

control  with  no  supervision,  practically,  by  any  city  or  local 
officials  interested  in  the  welfare  of  the  whole  people. 
Recreation  was  something  which  one  could  get  if  he  were 
able  to  get  it.  It  was  not  a  right  which  every  one  should 
have  for  his  own  happiness  and  educational  development. 

The  results  of  this  system  have  been  made  notorious  by 
many  noted  writers  and  investigators.  Jane  Addams  in 
her  *' Spirit  of  Youth  and  the  City  Streets"  has  shown  the 
hideous  forms  which  the  natural  instinctive  cravings  of 
youth  take  when  they  are  under  the  blight  of  a  false  economic 
and  social  regime.  Great  recreational  surveys  have  been 
made  for  multitudes  of  cities,  of  counties,  and  of  whole 
States.  We  have  begun  to  inquire  into  the  means  of  pro- 
moting the  best  life  of  the  race  through  other  means  than 
labor. 

The  Recreation  Movement. — In  1907  the  writer  was  a 
delegate  of  the  Minneapolis  Board  of  Education  to  the 
First  Playground  Festival  of  the  United  States,  held  under 
the  auspices  of  the  National  Playground  Association  of 
America,  which  had  just  been  formed.  There  on  the  great 
playgrounds  and  recreation  centres  of  the  South  Parks  of 
Chicago,  wonder-provoking  activities  along  many  lines  of 
recreation  and  avocation  that  were  desirable  and  delightful 
for  young  and  old  were  witnessed  by  many  thousands  of 
people.  At  that  time  play  was  a  thing  which  was  gener- 
ally considered  of  little  importance  at  the  school,  in  the 
home,  or  anywhere  else.  The  school  was  frequently  placed 
on  a  site  of  land  that  either  allowed  little  room  for  the 
natural  play  of  children,  or  was  so  rough,  muddy,  or  in 
such  a  dangerous  locality  as  to  preclude  any  possibility  of 
real  play.  No  money  was  spent  at  that  time,  practically, 
for  play  apparatus,  for  the  enlargement  of  school  sites,  for 
supervisors  of  play  and  recreation,  or  for  anything  else  of 
the  kind. 

Since  that  time  the  playground  movement  has  spread 
over  the  country  like  fire  in  the  prairie-grass.     Millions  are 


454  THE  CONSOLIDATED   RURAL  SCHOOL 

to-day  spent  for  play  and  recreational  activities  by  public 
governing  boards  for  the  people's  benefit  where  nickels 
were  spent  as  recently  as  1907.  We  have  certainly  awakened 
to  the  fact  that  all  work  and  no  play  not  only  makes  Jack 
a  dull  boy  but  robs  him  of  the  means  of  obtaining  directly 
and  at  first  hand  those  things  for  which  we  live  and  move 
and  have  our  being.  Recreation  in  the  cities  is  rapidly 
coming  under  city  control.  The  saloon  is  being  eliminated, 
and  various  institutions  are  springing  up  to  serve  its  social 
function.  Vice  has  been  driven  out,  and  the  dance-hall 
has  been  made  a  place  of  true  enjoyment  and  education, 
rather  than  a  means  of  degradation.  The  theatre  is  rapidly 
being  improved,  and  parks  and  other  recreational  centres, 
libraries,  outdoor  swimming-pools,  free  indoor  gymnasia, 
and  many  other  private  and  public  enterprises,  consciously 
directed  toward  the  people's  good,  are  being  provided.  In 
the  army  the  most  valuable  service  rendered  the  youth  of  our 
land  was  in  the  many  forms  of  education  and  socializing 
avocational  activities. 

Scientific  Studies. — In  much  of  this  work  we  are  being 
guided  to-day,  not  by  mere  sentiment  and  "common  sense," 
but  by  first-class  scientific  experts  who  have  gained  their 
skill  through  rigid  investigation  and  research.  Cities, 
awakening  to  the  problem  of  a  degraded  childhood  and  youth 
through  misused  leisure,  and  criticising  very  largely  the  work 
of  the  public  schools  for  not  uplifting  the  people,  have  de- 
termined in  many  instances  to  get  at  the  root  of  the  matter 
by  making  scientific  surveys  of  their  recreational  problems 
through  the  employment  of  experts  in  this  field.  In  these 
cities  all  of  the  many  types  of  recreation  have  been  studied. 
We  need  not  detail  the  whole,  although  few  people  realize 
perhaps  how  many  classes  of  recreation  there  are  and  how 
many  types  under  each  class.  Our  problem  here  is  not 
so  much  the  city  survey  and  what  has  been  discovered  in 
these  investigations  as  it  is  to  get  some  light  on  the  coun- 
try problem.     But  any   careful  study  of"  the   Springfield 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION  455 

survey,  of  the  Ipswich  survey,  of  the  Cleveland  surveys,  of 
the  Madison  survey,  of  the  California  survey,  or  of  the  recrea- 
tional phases  of  the  various  country  surveys  made  by  ex- 
perts of  the  Presbyterian  Church,  will  open  one's  eyes  con- 
siderably to  the  opportunities  and  possibilities  in  country 
recreational  development,  and  the  eyes  of  rural  leaders  and 
the  people  generally  must  be  opened  if  the  country  is  to  solve 
this  great  problem  of  promoting  avocational  enjoyment  and 
true  avocational  efl&ciency.^ 

III.    A  Programme  of  Recreation 

The  investigations  of  country  conditions  show  that 
much  awaits  to  be  done  and  that  the  people  are  about  ready 
to  take  up  this  newer  point  of  view,  and  to  bring  into  life 
that  which  has  been  so  long  eliminated — normal,  whole- 
some recreations.  All  they  need  is  leadership  and  training. 
Give  them  these  and  the  happy  enjoyment  of  the  children 
in  the  schools,  in  the  homes,  in  the  country  picnics,  and  on 
the  farms  will  do  the  rest. 

Some  of  the  great  instincts  of  life  which  have  worked 
themselves  out  in  forms  of  avocations  are  the  social  instinct, 
the  sex  instinct,  the  instinctive  delight  in  rhythm  and  music, 
and  the  instincts  of  physical  and  mental  activity. 

Practically  all  of  these  instincts  the  psychologist  shows  us, 
for  example,  find  normal  satisfaction  and  expression  in  the 
dance.  But  dancing  has  long  been  taboo  in  country  districts. 
''It  has  rarely  been  a  means  for  good,"  the  country  people 
say.  ''It  has  been  a  means  of  injury  rather  than  a  help.'' 
But  the  old  ascetic,  puritanical,  pioneer  doctrine  has  had 
more  to  do  with  this  attitude  than  anything  else,  and  there 
is  no  good  reason  why  dancing  should  not  be  a  means  of 
the  greatest  happiness  and  purest  pleasure  and  satisfaction 
for  both  young  and  old  in  the  country.     To  thrive,  the  danc- 

1 A  bibliography  of  surveys  may  be  obtained  from  the  Recreation  Di- 
vision of  the  Russell  Sage  Foundation  of  New  York. 


456  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

ing  should  be  managed  by  people  who  see  to  it  that  the  dance 
is  conducted  in  the  right  way,  and  who  will  insure  that  it 
is  made  an  educational  agency.  This  has  long  since  been 
discovered  in  the  city.  If  those  who  are  interested  in  the 
happiness  and  welfare  of  the  young  people  will  get  up  the 
dance  themselves;  will  see  that  the  right  kind  of  people  are 
invited;  will  provide  for  the  right  kind  of  music;  will  pro- 
vide the  right  kind  of  room,  and  other  conditions  in  which 
to  have  the  dance;  and  will  give  as  much  attention  and  super- 
vision to  it  as  is  given  to  the  supervision  of  the  children  at 
school,  then  good  and  only  good  will  come  out  of  it. 

To-day  we  are  bringing  back  from  **the  old  country" 
hundreds  of  the  simple  folk-dances  which  our  ancestors 
danced  on  the  village  greens  in  the  olden  days.  They  got 
from  them  normal,  natural  delights  and  satisfactions. 
They  were  considered  an  important  part  of  the  daily  life 
activities.  They  were  combined  frequently  with  reHgious 
festivals,  and  had  in  many  cases  a  religious  spirit  and  motive. 
The  music  breathes  a  spirit  of  innocence  and  purity,  quite 
in  contrast  with  many  of  the  filthy  *' rags''  that  one  may 
hear  in  the  dance-hall  run  for  private  profit  in  our  day. 
These  old  folk-dances  we  are  teaching  the  children  of  the 
cities.  Young  and  old  engage  in  them.  They  have  few 
or  none  of  the  objectionable  features  of  the  social  dances 
that  are  criticised  by  those  who  speak  of  dancing  as  some- 
thing to  be  kept  taboo.  If  we  brought  back  only  this  one 
activity  into  the  lives  of  the  country  people,  throughout 
the  long  winter  months,  at  least,  there  would  be  a  great 
deal  more  of  wholesome  social  intercourse  among  the  people 
of  the  community;  the  young  people  would  stay  young 
longer  on  the  farms,  and  the  delights  of  the  farm  would  be 
sufficient  to  hold  a  great  many  adult  people  who  find  it 
at  present  an  intolerably  sordid  bore. 

The  consolidated  school  is  the  natural  place  for  the 
radiation  of  this  gospel.  It  is  the  natural  social  centre  of 
the  community.     Where  it  is,  as  it  should  in  most  cases  be, 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND   CONSOLIDATION  457 

a  first-class  consolidated  school  furnishing  free  transporta- 
tion of  the  pupils,  a  good  auditorium  should  always  be 
provided.  This  auditorium  can  be  used  as  a  recreation 
centre  and  put  to  many  uses.  A  dance  learned  here  as 
physical  education,  in  the  auditorium  used  as  a  gymnasium 
or  in  a  separate  room  kept  for  the  special  purpose  of  a 
gymnasium,  and  provided  for  the  children  of  the  high  school 
and  their  relatives  and  friends,  can  be  made  a  very  fine 
educational  feature. 

We  do  not  need  to  start  with  the  dance,  of  course. 
Many  other  social  and  recreational  activities  can  be  en- 
gaged in.  But  the  dance  is  one  of  the  fundamental  recrea- 
tional inventions  of  the  human  mind,  and  we  are  discussing 
it  here  as  a  type  of  amusement  that  has  been  frowned  upon 
in  the  past  which  can  be  magically  transformed  into  some- 
thing noble  through  the  agency  of  the  public  schools.  Chil- 
dren who  learn  to  dance  the  natural  roundelays  and  folk- 
dances  will  not  have  the  same  morbid  attitude  toward  such 
recreations  as  they  have  when  they  are  carried  on  with  most 
of  the  people  of  the  community  frowning  upon  them  as 
illicit  activities  to  be  engaged  in  either  by  stealth  or  in  de- 
fiance of  social  usage.  Health,  grace,  courtesy,  physical 
education,  recreation,  and  normal  human  delight  can  be 
promoted  by  this  one  activity  alone. 

An  auditorium  or  gymnasium  of  this  kind  can  be  used 
for  a  great  many  other  recreational  purposes.  There  should 
be  an  assembly  period  of  all  the  pupils  every  day  of  the 
school  year  and  this  period  should  be  made  one  of  the  most 
important  phases  of  the  school  work.  This  period  should 
usually  be  not  less  than  thirty  minutes  in  length.  Here 
the  whole  school  comes  together  as  a  body  each  day,  and 
gets  a  unity  of  feeling  and  aspiration  which  is  second  to 
nothing  in  educational  value.  Here  the  young  may  learn 
to  engage  in  public  speaking,  in  singing  together  in  chorus 
the  good  old  songs  of  all  the  ages.  Here  beautiful  and  in- 
spiring literature  may  be  read  or  recited  by  the  pupils  and 


45^  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

teachers.  Here  the  young  may  express  their  dramatic  in- 
stincts in  little  plays  and  dramatizations  in  which  they  so 
naturally  delight.  A  thousand  and  one  beautiful  and  attract- 
ive uses  of  this  assembly  period  could  readily  be  related. 

Francis  Parker  in  his  wonderful  school  of  the  olden  days 
in  Chicago  made  this  assembly  period  a  great  educational 
force,  and  all  of  the  newer  schools  that  have  been  springing 
up  in  this  country  in  recent  years  have  been  putting  strong 
emphasis  upon  this  feature  of  school  life.  One  of  the  best 
phases  of  the  lives  of  the  children  in  the  Gary  school  system, 
for  example,  is  the  assembly  activities  of  the  pupils  which  are 
carried  on  all  day  long,  the  assembly-room  never  being 
empty,  different  groups  of  pupils  having  their  assembly 
exercises  there  at  different  hours  of  the  day. 

This  room,  too,  can  be  made  a  delightful  recreational 
and  social  centre  for  the  life  of  the  whole  people.  In  the 
evening,  the  school  vans  that  have  been  used  for  transport- 
ing the  pupils  during  the  daytime  can  be  used  for  carrying 
the  children  and  the  adults  to  the  meeting-place  at  night. 
If  the  auto-van,  heated  by  its  own  exhaust,  is  used  as  a 
carrier,  it  can  in  many  cases,  as  it  does  in  the  daytime, 
carry  not  one  but  two  loads  of  people  to  the  social  centre 
for  their  evening's  recreation.  Many  more,  of  course,  will 
come  in  their  own  conveyances,  since  the  horses  on  the  farm 
have  not  appreciably  decreased  in  number,  and  the  Fords 
and  other  cars  have  immeasurably  increased.  The  many 
ways  of  spending  a  pleasant  and  profitable  evening,  for  the 
people  of  a  rather  large  community  in  such  a  social  centre, 
world  fill  a  good-sized  book,  a  book  which  very  much 
needs  to  be  written  to-day  to  show  the  opportunities  and 
possibilities  in  this  direction,  and  to  describe  in  some  degree 
the  wonderful  achievements  which  are  being  made  in  this 
direction  by  many  enterprising  school  leaders  in  all  parts 
of  the  United  States.  We  can  only  suggest  them  here,  and 
refer  our  readers  to  other  articles  for  further  explanation 
and  suggestion. 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND   CONSOLIDATION  459 

The  outside  activities  of  the  children  on  the  playground, 
too,  are  a  great  means  of  recreation.  The  grounds  should 
be  at  least  ten  acres  in  extent,  over  an  acre  for  front  lawn 
and  building,  about  two  acres  for  play  apparatus  and  games, 
a  baseball  diamond  on  two  acres,  two  acres  for  teachers' 
cottages,  and  for  more  than  three  remaining  for  gardens, 
demonstration  farm,  and  a  decent  living  for  the  principal 
and  janitor.  We  have  suggested  twenty  acres  in  our  final 
chapter.  No  gymnasium  activities  should  be  engaged  in 
when  children  can  be  taken  out-of-doors  and  given  the 
benefit  of  exercise  and  play  there.  Here  all  of  the  good 
games  that  every  boy  and  every  girl  should  know,  that 
girls  and  boys  can  play  with  either  a  few  or  many  children, 
should  be  learned.  A  turning  pole  or  two,  basket-ball  goals 
for  the  boys  and  perhaps  for  the  girls,  swings  for  all  the 
children,  the  climbing  spar  for  the  boys,  and  perhaps  a 
jumping  pit,  will  furnish  endless  delight,  recreation,  and 
successful  education.  These  activities  are  pretty  fully  de- 
scribed elsewhere.  The  Boy  Scouts  and  the  Camp  Fire 
Girls  are  splendid  recreational  inventions  of  the  last  few 
years,  inventions  which  appeal  to  the  natural  instinctive 
life  of  the  children  in  a  rare  way,  and  which  direct  instinc- 
tive tendencies  and  activities  along  lines  that  produce  social 
habits  of  the  greatest  value  to  old  and  young. 

Why  were  they  not  discovered  and  invented  years  ago 
by  psychologists  and  educators  who  knew  the  instinctive 
nature  of  the  child  we  may  well  ask.  The  child's  original 
nature  and  acquired  interests  crave  the  activities  that  are 
both  delightful  and  socially  useful  in  the  long  run. 

Handicrafts. — Various  forms  of  craftsmanship  have  their 
avocational  value,  and  the  manual  training  and  farm  car- 
pentry will  not  be  without  their  recreational  uses.  Here  in 
the  social  centre,  too,  is  the  best  place  for  the  school  library, 
the  library  of  the  whole  community,  affording  good  litera- 
ture as  a  means  of  avocation  and  education  which  may 
radiate  to  all  the  homes  of  the  community.     These  and 


460  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

many  other  forms  of  recreation  and  avocation  may  well 
be  promoted  in  the  country  school. 

Recreation  Secretaries. — In  a  number  of  city  communi- 
ties recreation  secretaries  have  been  employed  to  give  their 
entire  time  to  such  activities.  A  county  might  well  employ 
such  a  person  to  promote  these  activities.  Some  of  the  work 
now  carried  on  by  such  secretaries  has  been  listed  as  follows 
by  the  Playground  and  Recreation  Association  of  America: 

Organization  and  executive  management  of  outdoor  playground 
system;  selection  and  training  of  play  leaders;  selection,  purchase, 
and  installation  of  equipment;  planning  of  buildings  and  alteration 
of  buildings  for  recreation  purposes. 

Responsibility  for  evening  recreation  centres. 

Responsibility  for  children's  gardens. 

Responsibility  for  conducting  athletic  badge  tests  for  both  boys 
and  girls  throughout  the  city. 

Arrangements  for  the  celebration  of  holidays. 

Arrangements  for  pageants. 

Co-operation  in  the  promotion  of  Boy  Scout  activities. 

Co-operation  in  the  promotion  of  Camp  Fire  Girls  activities. 

Arrangements  for  summer  camps. 

Provision  for  band  concerts  and  other  music. 

Responsibility  for  encouraging  wholesome  home  recreation,  ar- 
ranging that  games  be  taught  which  can  be  played  at  home,  providing 
places  where  parents  and  children  take  recreation  together. 

Studying  recreation  conditions  in  different  sections  to  attempt  to 
meet  any  special  conditions  found. 

Studying  private  recreation  agencies  to  find  recreation  furnished, 
and  number  reached,  to  avoid  duplication,  and  find  possible  ways  of 
assisting  by  furnishing  places  for  games  and  meetings. 

Supervision  of  commercial  recreation. 

Promotion  of  play  away  from  playgrounds. 

Arrangements  for  ice-skating  in  winter,  if  necessary  through 
flooding  of  vacant  lots. 

Arranging  coasting  places,  if  necessary  by  having  certain  streets 
set  aside  and  properly  guarded. 

Placing  recreation  workers  in  actual  contact  with  homes  of  the 
neighborhood. 

Promotion  of  school  athletics,  of  school  baseball,  basket-ball, 
volley-ball  leagues,  and  of  all  recreation  activities  for  school  boys 
and  girls  outside  of  regular  school  hours. 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION     46 1 

Arrangements  for  tramping  trips. 

Interpreting  to  the  public  through  addresses,  through  public 
press,  the  recreation  work  which  is  going  on  in  the  city. 

Co-operation  with  other  agencies  such  as  the  juvenile  court,  set- 
tlements, libraries,  churches,  and  various  social  organizations. 

The  country  Y.  M.  C.  A.  and  Y.  W.  C.  A.  are  to-day 
doing  a  great  work  along  this  Hne.  The  churches  are  be- 
ginning to  wake  up  and  give  some  assistance  in  the  field  of 
recreation,  and  other  agencies  are  helping  the  movement 
along.  But  it  is  probably  the  special  privilege,  opportunity, 
and  responsibility  of  the  public  school  to  promote  this  more 
abundant  living.  If  one  of  the  great  aims  of  education  is 
the  right  use  of  leisure,  recreation,  wholesome  enjoyment, 
or  avocational  efficiency,  then  it  is  one  of  our  principal 
duties  as  educators  in  the  public  schools,  dedicated  to  the 
welfare  of  the  whole  people,  to  devise  ways  and  means  to 
bring  back  into  the  lives  of  the  people  this  happy,  joyous, 
esthetic  spirit  and  life  which  ages  of  asceticism,  of  pioneer 
struggle,  and  of  puritanical  narrow-mindedness  have  too 
largely  driven  out  of  the  rural  public  mind. 

To  make  more  concrete  these  principles  of  rural  recrea- 
tion we  add  a  typical  example  of  what  can  be  done  for 
recreation  and  education  through  one  instrument,  the 
motion-picture  show.  It  is  contributed  by  B.  A.  Aughin- 
baugh,  principal  of  the  rural-school  district  at  Mingo, 
Champaign  County,  Ohio. 

IV.    Motion-Picture  Project  Conducted  by  a  Consolidated 
Rural  School 

Getting  the  Recreation  Machinery. — Statistics  inform  us  that  a 
larger  per  cent  of  the  inmates  in  our  insane  asylums  come  from  the 
rural  than  the  urban  population.  Experts  do  not  hesitate  to  place 
the  blame  on  a  lack  of  wholesome  recreation  in  the  rural  communi- 
ties. To  overcome  this  unfortunate  state  of  affairs  various  projects 
have  been  attempted  with  more  or  less  success.  The  failure  of  most 
of  these  projects  has  been  found  in  the  fact  that  they  were  not  sus- 
tained enough  in  their  efforts  to  make  the  attempt  worth  while,  or 


462  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

else  they  failed  to  realize  what  recreation  really  was.  Many  of  the 
projects  also  failed  to  take  note  of  the  fact,  that  the  farmer  of  to-day 
is  not  the  farmer  of  the  comic  sheet,  and  that  he  is  just  as  bored  by 
out-of-date  entertainment  as  any  city  man  would  be. 

Having  carefully  observed  these  conditions  for  a  number  of  years, 
and  watched  the  trend  of  times,  the  writer  determined  that  not  only 
would  a  motion-picture  project  be  a  paying  proposition  in  a  rural 
community,  but  that  it  would  do  a  very  needed  work  as  well.  Con- 
sequently, when  our  community  voted  to  erect  a  new  centralized 
school  and  auditorium,  I  saw  to  it  that  the  architect,  in  making  the 
plans  and  specifications,  included  in  same,  provisions  for  special  wir- 
ing for  operating  a  motion-picture  machine.  This  consisted  in  having 
a  number  five  copper  wire  run  directly  from  the  engine-room  to  a 
theatre  plug-outlet-box  at  the  back  of  the  auditorium.  I  did  not 
know  just  when  I  would  have  an  opportunity  to  put  my  plan  into 
execution,  but  I  intended  to  be  prepared  when  it  did  come. 

The  opportunity,  like  most  opportunities  one  is  looking  for,  came 
sooner  than  I  had  hoped  for.  Shortly  after  the  schoolhouse  was  com- 
pleted a  picture-house  failed  in  a  neighboring  city,  due  to  poor  manage- 
ment and  severe  competition.  The  equipment  was  offered  for  sale 
at  a  ridiculously  low  figure — one  machine,  aluminum-treated  screen, 
and  booth,  for  $1 10.  On  a  note,  secured  by  the  president  of  the  school 
board,  I  procured  the  money  from  bank  and  bought  the  outfit. 

On  May  31st,  191 7,  we  gave  our  first  show.  The  electric  current 
supply  is  derived  from  a  125  volt,  direct  current,  60  ampere,  7>^  kilo- 
watt, Fairbanks-Morse  generator  in  the  school  engine-room.  The 
motive  power  for  the  generator  is  a  10  horse-power  oil-engine.  The 
generator  also  supplies  the  building  with  electric  lights.  It  requires 
at  least  30  amperes  of  direct  current  at  no  volts  to  get  a  good  picture, 
if  the  screen  is  seventy  feet  from  the  machine,  as  is  ours.  We  however 
use  forty  amperes,  and  this  assures  us  of  a  brighter,  steadier  picture  with 
no  blue  spot  in  it.  The  usual  light  plant  equipment  found  in  most 
modern  schoolhouses,  where  city  current  is  not  used,  is  ample  for  run- 
ning a  picture-machine  arc,  that  is  if  at  least  3300  watts  can  be  ob- 
tained from  it  (found  by  multiplying  voltage  by  amperage).  Four 
thousand  four  hundred  watts  is  better.  The  amount  of  light  required 
may  be  reduced  by  three  things;  first,  a  good  reflective  screen  (a  mere 
muslin  sheet  is  not  suitable  for  motion-pictures  as  it  does  not  give 
definition  to  the  pictures  and  absorbs  too  much  light) ;  second,  dark- 
ness (darkness  is  cheaper  than  light  and  by  contrast  assists  in  pro- 
ducing just  as  good  a  picture — stray  daylight  or  lamplight  turns  the 
blacks  of  the  pictures  into  a  neutral  brown) ;  third,  proper  lense  system 
(a  bad  lense  is  a  poor  investment  at  half  its  cheapness  for  it  fails  to 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION  463 

let  through  the  essential  light  rays).  I  would  advise  no  one  to  attempt 
a  picture-show  on  a  commercial  basis,  as  we  have,  unless  he  expects 
to  give  as  good  or  better  screen  results  than  the  regular  picture  houses. 
He  may  expect  failure  if  he  does.  The  pictures  must  be  clear,  steady 
and  interesting.  The  small  portable  machines,  intended  only  for 
cl?.ssroom  use,  are  not  suitable  for  public  exhibitions  of  a  commercial 
nature.     New  machines  can  be  bought  for  $300  or  less. 

The  Method. — Our  first  show  was  procured  from  Paramount 
Company  and  consisted  of  Mary  Pickford  in  "Cinderella,"  a  Burton 
Holmes  travel  picture,  and  a  Bray  cartoon.  The  programme  consisted 
of  seven  reels  at  one  dollar  per  reel.  This  price  per  reel  will  differ  in 
various  communities,  depending  upon  the  population  of  the  com- 
munity. But  in  no  case  should  one  leave  the  determination  of  this 
price  entirely  to  the  distributors  for  they  are  going  to  get  all  they 
can  for  their  films.  It  is  best  to  find  out  what  some  regular  theatre 
is  paying,  and  then  work  out  a  little  proportion  problem  based  on 
the  population  of  the  city  where  this  picture-show  is  as  compared 
with  your  own  place.  I  do  not  advise  persons  desiring  to  try  this 
plan  to  procure  their  films  from  any  exchanges  but  the  regular  com- 
mercial concerns  or  such  as  have  an  equal  standing  and  equal  business 
methods.  Inferior  companies  that  pretend  to  cater  to  schools  and 
churches,  for  the  most  part  do  not  have  pictures  made  by  well-known 
actors,  and  they  usually  try  to  charge  most  unusual  prices.  The  best 
exchanges  will  gladly  supply  release  lists  giving  the  titles  of  their  pro- 
ductions and  make  quotations.  The  films  of  these  concerns  will  be 
found  to  cover  completely  the  fields  of  entertainment,  travel,  geogra- 
phy, science,  literature,  etc.  Moreover  their  films  are  well  produced 
and  physically  in  good  condition.  The  last  is  a  most  important  item 
because  badly  torn  or  soiled  films  will  never  give  good  screen  results. 

We  have  been  now  operating  our  show  for  one  year,  and  in  that 
time  we  have  not  only  paid  for  our  original  equipment,  but  have 
bought  a  second  machine  in  order  to  give  a  continuous  picture  on  the 
screen;  erected  a  new  booth;  bought  a  $700  player-piano;  helped  a 
$300  lecture  course  out  of  the  hole;  procured  many  additions  to  our 
talking-machine  and  piano  records  and  have  done  many  other  things 
for  the  benefit  of  the  school  and  community.  We  put  on  a  programme 
each  Friday  night  throughout  the  year,  summer  and  winter,  thus 
affording  continual  recreation  for  this  rural  community — not  the 
once-a-month  sort.  The  before-and-after-show-visiting  of  the  farmers 
is  a  real  help  in  itself.  Then,  too,  we  have  been  able  to  assist  in  war 
and  charitable  propaganda  and  also  assist  the  various  agricultural 
societies,  and  officials  educate  the  farmers  through  the  medium  of  the 
screen.     Our  regular  price  is  ten  cents  although  occasionally  we  in- 


464  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

crease  this  a  nickel  for  something  very  special.  We  have  never  lost 
on  but  one  or  two  shows  and  then  it  was  due  to  extremely  bad  weather 
conditions.  Our  community  numbers  only  500  people,  but  we  are 
Able  to  draw  on  a  much  larger  patronage  due  to  the  fact  that  we  have 
attained  perfect  projection  and  offer  clean,  entertaining  shows.  I 
might  mention  as  examples  of  the  features  shown,  David  Harum,  Tale 
of  Two  Cities,  The  Crisis,  The  Fall  of  a  Nation,  Twenty  Thousand 
Leagues  Under  the  Sea,  The  Man  Without  a  Country,  The  Re-Making 
of  a  Nation  (Government  Camp  Sherman  pictures),  EvangeHne,  The 
Prince  and  the  Pauper,  Oliver  Twist,  etc.,  etc.  We  have  also  taken 
our  audiences  around  the  world  with  so  noted  a  traveller  as  Burton 
Holmes  and  given  them  glimpses  into  the  animal  world  with  Dr. 
Ditmars.  We  have  also  provoked  them  to  laughter  with  Charlie 
Chaplin,  "Fatty  Arbuckle,"  Mutt  and  Jeff,  Bobby  Bumps,  Douglas 
Fairbanks,  etc. 

The  Results. — I  really  feel  that  we  have  accomplished  our  original 
intention  of  relieving  the  monotony  of  farm  life  by  supplying  whole- 
some entertainment  and  I  do  know  that  the  value  of  farm  land  has 
gone  up  in  this  vicinity  due,  as  one  man  put  it,  to  the  fact  that  this 
place  is  "alive." 

V.    Methods  of  Organizing  a  Community  for  Recrea- 
tion AND  Social  Development 

The  importance  of  organization  of  the  community  for 
recreation  and  social  development  cannot  be  overestimated. 
The  same  group  that  promotes  avocational  efficiency  for  the 
school  and  the  community  can  work  for  all  of  the  other 
four  types  of  efficiency  given  as  the  aims  of  education:  vital, 
vocational,  civic,  and  moral. 

The  two  following  practical  plans  for  this  work  have 
been  prepared  by  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education  {School 
Life,  August  16,  1918)  and  the  State  Department  of  Pubhc 
Instruction  of  Idaho  (Constitution,  in  "Handbook  for  Rural 
Teachers")' 

A,     How  to  Organize  a  Community  Centre 

Membership. — The  first  step  in  organization  is  to  define  the 
boundaries  of  the  community.  These  ought  to  be  determined  along 
natural  lines,  such  as  the  territory  from  which  the  children  in  the 


RURAL  RECREATION  AISTD  CONSOLIDATION  465 

school  are  drawn,  or  a  district  in  which  the  people  come  together 
for  other  reasons  than  the  fact  that  an  artificial  line  is  drawn  around 
them.     It  ought  not  to  be  too  large. 

Being  a  Httle  democracy,  all  adult  citizens,  both  men  and  women, 
living  in  the  prescribed  territory  are  members  of  it.  It  must  be  com- 
prehensive if  the  public  schoolhouse  is  to  be  used  as  its  capitol.  It  must 
be  non-partisan,  non-sectarian,  and  non-exclusive.  You  do  not  become 
a  member  of  a  community  by  joining.  You  are  a  merhber  by  virtue 
of  your  citizenship  and  residence  in  the  district.  Everywhere  else 
men  and  women  are  divided  into  groups  and  classes  on  the  ground  of 
their  personal  taste  or  occupation.  In  a  community  centre  they 
meet  as  ''folks"  on  the  ground  of  their  common  citizenship  and  their 
common  human  needs.  This  is  the  distinguishing  mark  of  the  com- 
munity centre. 

The  Community  Secretary. — Nothing  runs  itself  unless  it  is  run- 
ning down-hill.  If  community  work  is  to  be  done  somebody  has  to 
be  the  doer  of  it.  The  growing  realization  of  this  fact  has  led  to  the 
creation  of  a  new  profession.  The  term  applied  to  this  profession  is 
"community  secretary,"  "a  cooper  of  secrets,"  a  servant  of  the  whole 
community.  This  community  executive  should  be  elected  by  ballot 
in  a  public  election  held  in  the  schoolhouse  and  supported  out  of 
public  funds.  There  are  now  four  such  publicly  elected  and  pubHcly 
supported  community  secretaries  in  Washington,  D.  C,  and  eight 
more  such  ofiices  are  in  the  process  of  being  created.  It  seems  cer- 
tain that  it  is  destined  to  be  one  of  the  most  honored  and  useful  of 
all  pubHc  offices. 

The  qualifications  for  this  office  are  manifestly  large  and  its  duties 
complex  and  exacting.  The  ablest  person  to  be  found  is  none  too 
able.  The  function  of  the  secretary  is  nothing  less  than  to  organize 
and  to  keep  organized  all  the  community  activities  herein  described; 
to  assist  the  people  to  learn  the  science  and  to  practise  the  art  of  living 
together;  and  to  show  them  how  they  may  put  into  effective  opera- 
tion the  spirit  and  method  of  co-operation.  Who  is  equal  to  a  task 
like  this?  In  addition  to  intellectual  power  and  a  large  store  of 
general  information,  one  must  be  equipped  with  many  more  qualities 
equally  important.  The  seven  cardinal  virtues  of  a  community  secre- 
tary are:  Patience,  unselfishness,  a  sense  of  humor,  a  balanced  judg- 
ment, the  ability  to  differ  in  opinion  without  differing  in  feeling,  respect 
for  the  personality  of  other  people,  and  faith  in  the  good  inten- 
tions of  the  average  man.  Where  possible,  the  community  secre- 
tary ought  to  be  the  principal  of  the  school.  But  where  the  principal 
cannot  be  released  from  his  other  duties  sufficiently  to  undertake  the 
work  the  secretary  ought  to  be  a  person  who  is  agreeable  to  the  prin- 


466  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

cipal,  in  order  to  insure  concerted  action.  In  thousands  of  villages 
and  open-country  communities  the  teacher's  work  lasts  for  only  part 
of  the  year  and  the  compensation  is  shamefully  inadequate.  This  is 
a  great  economic  waste  as  well  as  an  injury  to  children.  If  these 
teachers  were  made  community  secretaries,  were  given  an  all-year- 
round  job,  and  were  compensated  for  the  additional  work  by  a  living 
wage,  it  would  mean  a  better  type  of  teacher  and  a  better  type  of 
school.  The  bigger  task  would  not  only  demand  the  bigger  person, 
but  the  task  itself  would  create  them.  Moreover,  when  the  teacher's 
activities  become  linked  up  with  life  processes  the  community  will  be 
the  more  willing  to  support  the  office  adequately.  It  seems  clear  that 
the  office  of  community  secretary  is  the  key  to  a  worthier  support  of 
the  school.  It  will  magnify  the  function  of  teaching,  give  a  new  civic 
status  to  the  teacher,  and  make  more  apparent  the  patriotic  and  con- 
structive service  which  the  school  renders  the  Nation. 

The  Board  of  Directors. — However  able  a  community  secretary 
may  be  no  one  alone  is  able  enough  for  the  constructive  kind  of  work 
which  the  community  centre  requires.  Since  it  is  a  co-operative  en- 
terprise, it  is  necessary  that  it  be  democratically  organized.  The  next 
step  in  its  organization,  therefore,  should  be  to  provide  the  secretary 
with  a  cabinet.  It  may  be  called  a  board  of  directors,  or  a  community 
council,  or  an  executive  committee.  These  names  suggest  its  various 
functions.  Its  first  function  is  to  give  council  and  advice  to  the 
community  secretary,  to  act  as  a  little  forum  for  discussion,  out  of 
which  may  develop  wise  methods  of  procedure.  Its  next  function  is 
to  share  with  the  secretary  the  responsibility  for  the  work,  the  burden 
of  which  is  too  heavy  to  be  borne  by  any  one  alone.  But  the  cabinet 
is  not  a  legislative  body  alone,  to  determine  what  is  to  be  done,  but 
also  an  executive  body  as  well.  It  is  not  only  an  executive  body,  to 
carry  out  the  general  plans  of  the  association,  but  also  a  body  of 
directors  to  plan  and  conduct  special  kinds  of  activities.  In  every 
community  there  are  men  and  women  who  have  the  ability  and 
leisure  to  render  public  service.  As  directors  they  would  have  a  recog- 
nized position  and  channel  through  which  they  can  more  effectively 
render  such  service. 

Each  director  ought  to  be  the  head  of  a  department  of  work,  or 
at  least  the  head  of  every  department  of  work  ought  to  be  a  director. 
The  head  of  each  department  ought  to  choose  the  members  of  his 
own  committee.  Thus,  by  having  the  heads  of  departments  work 
on  the  board  of  directors  the  entire  work  of  the  association  can  be 
frequently  reviewed,  and  the  departments  of  activity  can,  by  co- 
operating, not  only  avoid  needless  waste  through  duplication,  but  also 
stimulate  each  other.     The  board  of  directors  ought  to  hold  regular 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION  467 

meetings  in  the  schoolhouse,  and  in  order  that  the  work  may  be  re- 
sponsive to  public  opinion  the  meetings  ought  to  be  open  to  any  who 
wish  to  attend  them,  just  as  the  meetings  of  a  town  council  are  open. 
The  community  centre  stands  for  visible  government  and  daylight 
diplomacy. 

The  Trouble  Committee. — It  is  not  so  diflGicult  to  organize  a  com- 
munity centre;  the  difficulty  is  to  keep  it  organized.  By  no  means 
the  only  one,  but  the  chief  means  of  securing  a  permanently  useful 
community  centre  is  to  have  a  wise  and  constructive  programme, 
big  enough  to  merit  interest.  A  good  way  to  formulate  such  a  pro- 
gramme is  to  appoint  a  permanent  committee  which  we  may  call 
"the  trouble  committee."  The  ftmction  of  this  committee  is  not  to 
make  trouble,  but  to  remove  it.  Its  task  is  to  discover  the  causes 
of  trouble  in  the  community,  to  learn  the  reasons  for  dissatisfaction, 
to  state  the  problems  which  ought  to  be  solved,  to  exhibit  the  thing 
that  needs  to  be  done. 

The  function  of  the  trouble  committee  is  to  furnish  nuts  for  the 
community  association  to  crack.  No  one  believes  in  diagnosis  for 
the  sake  of  diagnosis  any  more  than  he  believes  in  "amputation  for 
the  sake  of  amputation.'*  Its  only  use  is  to  reveal  the  disease  and  to 
point  the  way  to  a  remedy.  The  aim  of  the  trouble  committee  is  to 
point  out  the  difficulties  at  the  bottom  of  our  social  problems  for  the 
sake  of  removing  them.  Whenever  they  are  removed,  the  problem 
vanishes.     The  method  of  the  committee  is  constructive  democracy. 

Public  and  Self-Support. — The  finances  of  an  organization  usually 
constitute  its  storm  centre.  Money  is  the  kind  of  thing  it  is  difficult 
to  get  along  with  and  impossible  to  get  along  without.  After  a  com- 
munity centre  determines  its  plans  and  policies,  the  next  question  in 
its  organization  is  finance.  But  since  money  is  the  root  of  so  much 
trouble,  it  ought  to  be  kept  in  the  background.  It  is  properly  called 
"ways  and  means."  It  is  not  the  end;  human  welfare  is  the  end. 
Money  is  a  detail  and  ought  always  to  be  treated  as  such. 

The  superior  advantage  of  a  community  centre  over  private  or- 
ganizations is  that  it  does  not  need  an  amount  of  money  sufficient  to 
cause  it  any  distress.  To  begin  with,  there  are  no  dues.  They  are 
already  paid  when  the  taxes  are  paid.  The  schoolhouse,  together 
with  heat,  light,  and  janitor  service,  and  in  some  places  a  portion  of 
the  secretary's  salary,  is  provided  out  of  public  funds.  Thus  the  over- 
head charges  are  comparatively  small.  The  time  will  doubtless  come 
when  the  entire  expense  will  be  provided  out  of  public  funds,  but  the 
movement  is  new,  and  for  the  present  and  immediate  future  if  the 
building,  heat,  light,  and  janitor  service  are  provided  it  is  all  that  can 
reasonably  be  expected. 


468  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

A  Working  Constitution. — What's  constitution  among  friends? 
It's  a  necessity  if  they  are  to  continue  to  be  friends.  As  the  word 
itself  suggests,  a  constitution  establishes  the  basis  on  which  friends 
may  stand  for  the  accomplishment  of  their  common  purposes.  Its 
value  is  always  to  be  measured  by  the  importance  of  the  purpose  to 
be  accomplished.  Inasmuch  as  the  purpose  of  a  community  centre 
is  of  the  highest  value  not  only  to  the  welfare  of  the  local  community, 
but  also  to  the  welfare  of  democracy  in  the  Nation  and  in  the  world, 
the  making  of  its  constitution  is  a  highly  important  item  in  its  organ- 
ization. 

As  regards  the  work  of  the  community  centre,  the  constitution  is 
a  working  agreement,  a  clear  understanding  as  to  what  is  to  be  done 
and  who  is  to  do  it.  A  clear  statement  will  prevent  needless  friction 
and  confusion.  As  regards  the  growth  of  the  work  in  the  community, 
the  constitution  will  serve  the  purpose  of  propaganda.  If  a  new  or 
uninformed  member  of  the  community  should  ask  an  active  member, 
"What  is  a  community  centre  and  what  is  its  purpose?"  a  copy  of 
the  constitution  ought  to  furnish  a  full  answer  to  his  question.  There- 
fore, it  should  not  be  too  brief,  if  it  is  to  answer  this  purpose. 

Each  community  ought  to  draft  its  own  constitution,  not  only 
because  the  needs  of  communities  vary,  and  not  only  because  it  should 
be  the  honest  expression  of  the  community's  own  thought  and  purpose, 
but  especially  because  a  constitution  brought  from  outside  and  dropped 
on  the  people's  heads  has  little  value  for  the  community. 

The  Ten  Commandments. — While  the  types  of  constitutions  will 
be  very  various,  yet  there  are  certain  formative  principles  which  are 
basic  in  the  structure  of  a  community  centre.  They  are  so  essential 
to  the  life  of  the  community  ideal  that  the  writer  has  called  them 
"The  ten  commandments  for  a  community  centre."  They  are  as 
follows: 

I.  It  must  guarantee  freedom  of  thought  and  freedom  in  its 
expression. 

II.  It  must  aim  at  unity,  not  uniformity,  and  accentuate  re- 
semblances, not  differences. 

III.  It  must  be  organized  democratically,  with  the  right  to  learn 
by  making  mistakes. 

IV.  It  must  be  free  from  the  domination  of  money,  giving  the 
right  of  way  to  character  and  intelligence. 

V.  It  must  be  non-partisan,  non-sectarian,  and  non-exclusive  both 
in  purpose  and  practice. 

VI.  Remember  that  nothing  will  run  itself  unless  it  is  running 
down-hill. 

VII.  Remember  that  to  get  anywhere  it  is  necessary  to  start 
from  where  you  are. 


RURAL  RECREATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION  469 

VIII.  Remember  that  the  thing  to  be  done  is  more  important 
than  the  method  of  doing  it. 

IX.  Remember  that  the  water  in  a  well  cannot  be  purified  by 
painting  the  pump. 

X.  Remember  that  progress  is  possible  only  when  there  is 
mental  hospitality  to  new  ideas. 

B.    Constitution 

ARTICLE  I — NAME 

The  name  of  this  club  shall  be  The 

Community  Club. 

ARTICLE  n — OBJECT 

The  object  of  this  club  shall  be:  Conducting  public  meetings  for 
the  presentation  and  open  discussion  of  live  subjects;  the  physical 
improvement  of  the  community  environment;  and  the  social,  moral 
and  educational  development  of  the  people. 

ARTICLE  III — MEMBERSHIP 

Section   I,     Associate    Members.     Every    person   living   in   the 

vicinity  of is  considered  an  associate  member 

of  this  club. 

Section  II.     Any  person  sixteen  years  of  age  and  over  living  in 

the  vicinity  of is  eligible  to  become  an  active 

member  of  the  club  upon  giving  his  or  her  name  to  any  member  of 
the  executive  committee. 

ARTICLE  IV — OFFICERS   AND   ELECTIONS 

Section  I.  There  shall  be  the  following  officers:  President;  First, 
Second  and  Third  Vice  Presidents;  Secretary,  and  Treasurer. 

Section  II.     The  officers  shall  be  elected  at  the  annual  meeting  of 

the  club  which  shall  be  held  on ,  to  serve  for  a 

term  of  one  year  each.  Only  active  members  shall  be  allowed  to  vote 
for  officers,  and  only  active  members  are  eligible  to  office. 

ARTICLE   V — DUTIES    OF   OFFICERS 

Section  I.  President.  It  shall  be  the  duty  of  the  President  to 
preside  at  all  meetings  of  the  club,  and  also  to  serve  as  chairman  of 
the  executive  committee  of  the  club. 

Section  II.  First  Vice  President.  It  shall  be  the  duty  of  the 
First  Vice  President  to  preside  at  the  meetings  of  the  club  in  the 


470  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

absence  of  or  at  the  request  of  the  President.  He  shall  also  be  chair- 
man of  the  Programme  Committee. 

Section  III.  Second  Vice  President.  It  shall  be  the  duty  of  the 
Second  Vice  President  to  serve  as  chairman  of  the  Improvement  Com- 
mittee of  the  club. 

Section  IV.  Third  Vice  President.  It  shall  be  the  duty  of  the 
Third  Vice  President  to  serve  as  chairman  of  the  Social  Service  Com- 
mittee of  the  club. 

Section  V.  It  shall  be  the  duty  of  the  Secretary  to  keep  the 
minutes  of  the  proceedings  of  the  club;  to  keep  a  list  of  active  mem- 
bers; to  receive  names  of  new  members;  to  carry  on  the  correspon- 
dence of  the  club,  and  to  fulfil  such  other  duties  as  usually  pertain  to 
this  office. 

Section  VI.  It  shall  be  the  duty  of  the  Treasurer  to  collect  and 
disburse  the  money  of  the  club;  to  keep  a  record  of  all  money  re- 
ceived, spent  and  on  hand,  and  to  report  upon  the  state  of  the  trea- 
sury at  the  annual  meeting  or  whenever  called  upon  to  do  so. 

ARTICLE  VI — COMMITTEES 

Section  I.  Executive  Committee.  The  Executive  Committee 
shall  consist  of  the  elected  officers  of  the  club.  It  shall  be  the  duty 
of  this  committee  to  confer  upon  questions  regarding  the  welfare  of 
the  club;  to  consider  and  recommend  matters  of  importance  to  the 
club,  and  in  unusual  matters  requiring  haste  to  act  for  the  club. 

Section  II.  Programme  Committee.  The  Programme  Com- 
mittee shall  consist  of  the  First  Vice  President  of  the  club  and  two 
other  members  chosen  by  him.  It  shall  be  the  duty  of  this  committee 
to  arrange  programmes  for  all  the  meetings  of  the  club;  to  secure 
speakers;  and  to  suggest  topics  for  discussion,  which  shall  insure 
profitable  and  interesting  meetings;  to  promote  the  publicity  of  the 
club  through  the  local  papers;  to  announce  programmes  of  the  meet- 
ing of  the  club,  and  otherwise  to  carry  on  the  work  of  publicity  for  the 
club. 

Section  III.  Improvement  Committee.  The  Improvement  Com- 
mittee shall  consist  of  the  Second  Vice  President  and  two  (or  four) 
other  members  appointed  by  him.  It  shall  be  the  duty  of  this  com- 
mittee to  investigate  and  bring  to  the  attention  of  the  club  all  matters 
pertaining  to  local  community  improvement,  and  to  act  by  direction 
of  the  club,  in  consummating  such  improvement.  (This  committee 
shall  look  after  business  needs.) 

Section  IV.  Social  Service  Committee.  The  Social  Service  Com- 
mittee shall  consist  of  the  Third  Vice  President  and  two  (or  four) 


Junior  orchestra,  ages  6  to  1 2 


Vital  efficiency  through  physical  education  is  emphasized  in  all  Philippine 

schools 


RURAL  RECREATION   AND  CONSOLIDATION  47 1 

other  members  appointed  by  him.  They  shall  have  supervision  of  all 
social,  moral  and  educational  activities  of  the  club  for  the  community. 
(This  committee  shall  look  after  the  social  needs.) 

ARTICLE   VII — MEETINGS 

The  club  shall  hold  regular  meetings  each 

evening,  in  the ,  between  the  hours  of  7:30  and 

10  o'clock. 

ARTICLE   VIII — DUES 

The  dues  of  the  club  shall  be per  year  for  each  active 

member,  to  aid  in  meeting  the  local  expenses  of  the  organization. 

ARTICLE   IX — QUORUM 

Eight  active  members  of  the  club  shall  constitute  a  quorum  for 
the  transaction  of  all  business. 

ARTICLE  X — AMENDMENTS 

The  Constitution  may  be  amended  by  two-thirds  vote  of  the 
active  members  present  at  any  regular  meeting. 

ORDER   OF   BUSINESS  AND  BY-LAWS 

The  order  of  business  in  all  regular  meetings  of  the  club  shall  be 
as  follows: 

1.  Social  half  hour. 

2.  Call  to  order. 

3.  Song. 

4.  Reading  minutes  of  previous  meeting. 

5.  Report  of  special  committees. 

6.  Report  of  standing  committees. 

7.  Treasurer's  report. 

8.  Unfinished  business. 

9.  New  business. 

10.  Special  programme. 

11.  Discussion. 

12.  Adjournment. 

I.  The  meeting  shall  be  called  to  order  so  that  the  business  rou- 
tine may  be  disposed  of  and  the  special  programme  of  the  evening 
begun  by  8:15  o'clock.  This  part  of  the  programme,  including  the 
general  discussions,  shall  not  usually  exceed  one  and  one-fourth  hours. 


472  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

2.  The  chairman  of  the  meeting  may  leave  the  chair  in  order  to 
engage  in  discussion. 

3.  In  speaking  from  the  floor  in  the  open  discussion  which  fol- 
lows the  main  address  or  in  any  other  event,  the  parliamentary  rules 
of  addressing  the  chair,  etc.,  shall  be  strictly  followed. 

4.  Speeches  from  the  floor  are  limited  to  five  minutes  and  the 
time  may  be  extended  only  by  unanimous  consent. 

5.  No  speaker  may  have  the  floor  a  second  time,  unless  all  others 
who  wish  to  speak  have  had  an  opportunity  to  do  so. 

6.  Speeches  from  the  floor  must  deal  with  the  subject  chosen  for 
discussion. 

LIST  OF  TOPICS  FOR  COMMUNITY  MEETINGS 

A  suggested  list  of  topics  for  consideration  and  discussion.  Many 
others  will  occur  to  the  programme  committee  who  know  the  local 
situation.  All  matters  for  reports  and  discussions  should  be  of  a 
constructive  nature  and  of  special  value  to  the  entire  neighborhood. 
The  watchword  in  every  undertaking  and  in  each  programme  should 
be  co-operation. 

The  following  list  of  subjects  may  be  used  for  community  meetings: 

1.  The  kinds  of  waste  on  the  farm. 

2.  The  kinds  of  waste  in  the  home. 

3.  Value  of  neighborhood  entertainments. 

4.  How  to  exterminate  the  typhoid  or  common  house-fly. 

5.  Relation  of  the  house-fly  to  contagious  and  infectious  diseases. 

6.  The  value  of  playgrounds  for  country  children. 

7.  Women's  clubs  in  the  country. 

8.  How  to  make  poultry  pay  on  the  farm. 

9.  Pure-bred  versus  scrub  dairy  cows. 

10.  Should  Agriculture,  Manual  Training  and  Home  Economics 
be  taught  in  our  school? 

11.  The  Farmers'  Institute. 

12.  Boys'  and  girls'  clubs. 

13.  How  best  to  use  the  Extension  Department  of  the  University. 

14.  The  value  of  demonstration  work  in  Agriculture  and  Home 
Economics. 

15.  The  relation  of  water-supply  to  contagious  diseases. 

16.  How  to  use  the  "State  Free  Travelling  Library." 

17.  Things  that  every  taxpayer  should  know  about  local  govern- 
ment. 

18.  How  to  improve  production  in  our  community. 

19.  The  problem  of  our  roads. 

20.  The  need  for  more  social  advantages  in  the  country. 


RURAL   RECREATION  AND  CONSOLIDATION  473 

21.  Why  farmers  move  to  the  city. 

22.  Modern  conveniences  on  the  farm. 

23.  The  business  side  of  farming. 

24.  The  products  we  can  market  best. 

A  SUGGESTIVE  PROGRAMME  FOR  A  COMMUNITY  MEETING 

Subject:  "Reading  Matter  in  the  Home" 

1.  Music. 

2.  Paper — The  Magazine  I  Like  Best,  and  Why. 

3.  General  Discussion. 

4.  Recitation. 

5.  Paper — What  makes  a  good  children's  book,  and  where  can  it 
be  found? 

6.  General  Discussion. 

7.  Round  table — (a)  The  papers  that  should  be  in  every  home. 

(b)  Influence  of  an  early  reading  habit. 

(c)  How  to  satisfy  the  love  of  adventure  in  boys' 

reading. 

(d)  Recent  books  on  farm  life  that  are  worth 

while. 

8.  Music. 

PROBLEMS  IN  APPLICATION 

1.  What  steps  could  be  taken  in  the  district  where  you  teach  or 

some  other  similar  district  to  establish  a  community  organiza- 
tion? 

2.  What  are  the  principal  pitfalls  encountered  by  such  organizations 

and  how  may  they  best  be  avoided? 

3.  Review  one  of  the  bulletins  of  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education  on 

the  Community  Centre. 

4.  Review  the  chapter  on  Play  and  Recreation  in  Country  Schools  in 

Rapeer's  "Educational  Hygiene." 

5.  Make  up  a  list  of  the  five  best  pamphlets  and  books  on  play 

and  recreation  for  country  people. 

6.  What  could  such  an  organization  do  for  civil  education? 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1.  Curtis — "Play  and  Recreation  for  the  Open  Country."     Ginn 

&Co. 

2.  Perry — "Wider  Use  of  the  School  Plant."     Charities  Publication 

Committee,  New  York. 


474  THE  CONSOLroATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

3.  Foght— "The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work,"  part  III,  chap.  VI. 

Macmillan. 

4.  Bancroft — "  Games  for  the  Playground."     Macmillan. 

5.  Parker— "Methods  of  Teaching  in  High  School."     Ginn  &  Co. 

6.  Stern — "Neighborhood  Entertainments."     Sturgis  &  Walton. 

7.  Ward— "The  Social  Centre."     Appleton. 

8.  Jackson — "A  Community  Centre,  What  It  Is  and  How  to  Or- 

ganize It."     Government  Printing  Office. 

9.  "Recreation  Manual  for  Teachers."    State  Dept.  of  Public  In- 

struction for  Oregon. 
10.  Rapeer — "Teaching  Elementary-School  Subjects,"  chaps.  I,  XIX, 
XXI,  XXII.    Scribner. 


CHAPTER  XXI 
THE  DIFFICULTIES   OF  CONSOLIDATION 

Preliminary  Problems 

1.  What  are  some  of  the  reasons  why  the  facts  and  promises  of  con- 

solidation are  not  brought  to  the  attention  of  many  communi- 
ties that  would  profit  by  it? 

2.  What  are  some  of  the  faults  in  the  methods  of  presenting  this 

reform  to  rural  communities? 

3.  What  are  some  of  the  leading  reasons  for  not  acting  on  consolida- 

tion after  the  matter  has  been  presented? 

4.  Give  some  of  the  arguments  usually  advanced  against  consolida- 

tion. 

5.  Name  the  points  over  which  naost  care  must  be  taken  in  consoli- 

dation to  avoid  complaints  and  reaction. 

Source  of  Material  Used. — In  studying  the  problem 
suggested  above  an  attempt  has  been  made  to  learn  what 
the  leading  rural  leaders  of  to-day  are  thinking  and  saying 
about  rural  school  consolidation.  Accordingly,  the  State 
Superintendents  of  Public  Instruction  and  the  State  Super- 
visors and  Inspectors  of  Rural  Schools  have  been  requested, 
as  the  persons  who  would  perhaps  be  best  prepared  to  give 
opinions  of  value,  to  report  on  the  consolidated  school  as  they 
found  it.  The  discussion  which  follows  is  based  very  largely 
upon  the  contents  of  the  letters  which  these  leaders  were 
kind  enough  to  write  in  response  to  a  questionnaire. 

Our  first  impression  in  going  over  the  large  number  of 
letters  received  from  these  state  leaders  is  that  probably 
no  single  scheme  or  plan  of  consolidation  of  schools  can 
be  followed  by  all,  or  even  by  any  very  large  number,  of 
the  states.  It  is  a  matter  which  depends  upon  the  kind 
of  school  organization  in  a  given  state,  the  topography  of 

475 


476  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

the  country,  the  condition  of  public  highways  and  of  other 
means  of  transportation,  the  attitude  of  the  people  toward 
progress  in  general,  their  past  experience  with  schools,  and 
upon  a  number  of  other  conditions  peculiar  to  a  given  state 
or  section  of  the  country.  If  one  should  take  a  report  of 
what  one  state,  or  what  a  group  of  states,  is  doing  by  way 
of  consolidation  and  undertake  to  duplicate  closely  that 
system  for  his  own  state,  he  would  probably  fail  in  his 
undertaking.  Consolidation  of  schools  must  be  the  result 
of  years  of  study,  invention,  experimentation,  and  adapta- 
tion, on  the  home  grounds.  But,  of  course,  the  experiences 
of  others  are  of  incalculable  value  to  the  one  who  plans  for 
the  consolidation  of  schools,  particularly  so  if  plans  are 
being  laid  upon  state-wide  proportions. 

Four  Fundamental  Problems. — The  reports  from  the 
several  states  are  extremely  interesting.  Whether  expressed 
or  implied,  a  few  points  stand  out  boldly  as  constituting 
the  fundamental  problems  of  the  consolidation  of  rural 
schools.  They  are  (i)  the  conservatism  and  the  prejudices 
of  the  people,  (2)  the  transportation  problem,  (3)  the  added 
expense,  and  (4)  the  character  of  the  teaching  in  this  new 
type  of  public  school. 

From  Massachusetts,  the  mother  of  the  consolidated 
school,  comes  a  summary  by  Mr.  Francis  G.  Wadsworth, 
Agent  of  the  State  Board  of  Education: 

DANGERS 

(a)  Inadequate  provisions  for  transportation. 

(b)  The  unsupervised  noon  hour. 

DIFFICULTIES 

(a)  Securing  appropriations  for  new  buildings. 

(b)  Bad  roads. 

(c)  Finding  competent  drivers  for  barges. 

(d)  Satisfying  parents  whose  children  are  required  to  walk  to 
meet  the  school  barges. 

(e)  Providing  warm  luncheons  for  children  at  the  schools. 


THE  DIFFICULTIES  OF  CONSOLIDATION  477 

SHORTCOMINGS 

(a)  It  takes  the  children  away  from  home  for  a  longer  period  of 
the  day,  and  limits  the  working  time  of  boys  and  girls  on  the  home 
farm. 

(b)  It  makes  it  difficult  for  parents  to  visit  the  school  so  as  to 
become  intimately  acquainted  with  the  work  therein. 

A  moment's  thought  upon  these  statements  will  indicate 
the  wide  range  of  possible  dangers,  difficulties,  and  short- 
comings of  the  rural  consolidated  school.  That  the  argu- 
ments are  not  all  on  the  positive  side  of  the  question  is  clear. 
But  no  scheme  is  without  shortcomings. 

State  Superintendent  Chas.  A.  Greathouse,  of  Indiana, 
where  consolidation  has  been  effected  on  a  very  large  scale, 
has  this  to  say:  "The  only  real  objection  raised  by  the  pa- 
trons is  the  matter  of  transportation,  usually  the  fault  of 
the  township  trustee  in  allowing  too  long  a  route.  When 
this  is  adjusted,  I  think  I  can  safely  say  there  is  very  little 
difficulty." 

Let  us  consider  the  four  principal  points  stated  above. 

I.  The  Conservatism  and  the  Prejudices  of  the  People. — 
We  do  not  mean  to  imply  that  these  two  terms  are  synony- 
mous. They  are,  however,  very  closely  linked  together. 
In  the  first  place,  rural  people  are  characteristically  conserva- 
tive. They  require  some  time  to  think  things  out  and  reach 
new  conclusions.  The  danger  is  that  the  rural  leaders 
may  be  overambitious  to  get  results  quickly.  To  act,  or 
to  lead  the  people  to  act  before  public  sentiment  approves, 
will  probably  result  in  failure,  or  at  least  in  disappointment. 
The  possibility  of  going  too  fast,  or  of  going  too  far,  in  a 
consolidation  project  constitutes  a  very  serious  danger  of 
the  consolidated  school.  A  great  many  readjustments 
have  had  to  be  made  and  in  some  cases  the  consolidated- 
school  buildings  have  actually  been  abandoned,  and  the 
little  neighborhood  schools  again  opened.  Sometimes  we 
literally  make  haste  by  going  slowly. 

Furthermore,  one  failure  of  this  kind  will  be  so  adver- 


47^  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

tised  for  miles  around  that  it  becomes  more  difficult  than 
ever  to  effect  consolidation  in  other  places.  Unless  public 
sentiment  has  been  cultivated,  as  indicated  above,  the 
management  of  a  new  consolidated  school  is  likely  to  ex- 
perience great  difficulty  at  first  in  "making  good"  with  the 
people. 

In  the  second  place,  the  rural  adult  population  have 
very  strong  prejudices.  The  minds  of  a  good  many  of  them 
are  made  up  for  all  time.  Things  are  thus  and  so,  and  they 
could  not  be  otherwise.  There  will  be  found  another  group 
who  are  open  to  conviction,  but  who  do  not  have  very 
positive  views  upon  such  questions  as  the  consolidation  of 
schools.  They  await,  with  more  or  less  indifference,  for  de- 
velopments before  making  up  their  minds.  And  there  is  a 
third  group,  usually  in  the  minority,  who  are  strong  advo- 
cates of  consolidation  and  of  every  other  progressive  measure 
calculated  to  improve  their  schools  and  the  community  in 
general.  The  second  group  mentioned,  the  open-minded, 
hold  the  balance  of  public  sentiment.  The  whole  proposi- 
tion will  rise  or  fall  in  accordance  with  the  way  they  make 
up  their  minds  on  this  innovation  suddenly  sprung  upon 
them  by  the  last-named  group,  the  leaders. 

Any  one  who  has  had  experience  at  first  hand  in  pro- 
moting consolidation  of  schools  will  agree  that  there  is  an 
almost  universal  prejudice  against  giving  up  the  neighbor- 
hood school.  Several  years  ago  in  his  "The  State  and  The 
Farmer,"  Dean  L.  H.  Bailey  made  the  following  comment 
upon  this  phase  of  consolidation: 

The  greatest  difficulty  in  bringing  about  the  consolidation  of  schools 
is  a  deep-seated  prejudice  against  giving  up  the  old  school.  This 
prejudice  is  usually  not  expressed  in  words.  Often  it  is  really  uncon- 
scious to  the  person  himself.  Yet  I  wonder  whether  right  here  does 
not  lie  a  fundamental  and  valid  reason  against  the  uniform  consolida- 
tion of  rural  schools,  a  feeling  that  when  the  school  leaves  the  locality 
something  vital  has  gone  out  of  the  neighborhood.  Local  pride  has 
been  offended.  Initiative  has  been  removed  one  step  farther  away. 
The  locality  has  lost  something. 


THE  DIFFICULTIES   OF  CONSOLIDATION  479 

In  December,  191 6,  Superintendent  Edward  Hyatt,  of 
California,  expressed  the  same  idea  in  his  report: 

The  principal  dangers  seem  to  be  that  the  people  do  not  willingly 
give  up  their  little  rural  districts.  It  is  a  species  of  religion  or  patri- 
otism to  stand  up  for  one's  own  school  district  and  to  combat  its  loss. 
This  and  the  bad  feeling  growing  out  of  it  hinder  the  success  of  the 
consolidated  school. 

Matter  for  Serious  Consideration. — Statements  of  this 
kind  coming  from  authorities  so  eminent  as  are  Dean 
Bailey  and  Superintendent  Hyatt  call  for  our  most  careful 
consideration  of  this  aspect  of  the  rural  consolidated  school. 
Some  of  our  more  ardent  advocates  of  consolidation  seem 
to  think  it  almost  unbelievable  that  persons  can  be  so 
lacking  in  public  spirit,  in  patriotism,  and  even  in  common 
sense,  as  to  stand  in  the  way  of  so  fine  a  means  of  improv- 
ing their  educational  facilities.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  most 
of  these  *^ standpatters"  are  absolutely  honest  in  their  con- 
victions. 

We  should  bear  in  mind  that  the  consolidation  of  a 
group  of  country  schools  is  a  pretty  radical  change  to  be 
brought  about  in  a  comparatively  short  time.  Since  the 
earliest  settlements,  the  children  at  any  given  time  have 
attended  the  little  neighborhood  school.  It  required 
perhaps  not  over  thirty  minutes  for  the  farthest  ones  to 
walk  to  or  from  the  school.  They  carried  their  lunch- 
baskets  with  them.  The  little  school  and  its  routine  work 
have  been  a  fixed  part  of  the  community.  Now,  rather 
suddenly,  the  doors  of  the  home  school  are  closed.  Wagons 
come  along,  pick  up  the  children  and  drive  them  off  from 
three  to  six  miles  to  a  strange  school  situated  in  another 
community.  Instead  of  thirty  minutes  it  may  require 
from  one  to  two  hours  to  make  the  drive.  The  lunch-basket 
is  often  replaced  at  the  school  by  the  warm  lunch,  which 
the  mother  has  no  part  in  preparing.  Up  to  this  time  the 
traditional  course  of  study  has  prevailed.     Now  domestic 


480  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

science,  manual  training,  agriculture,  commercial  subjects, 
music,  and  drawing  are  studied,  subjects  which  many  of 
the  parents  do  not  know  how  to  appreciate.  It  is  perhaps 
the  greatest  and  most  sudden  change  that  these  small 
communities  have  ever  experienced.  Is  it  any  wonder  that 
the  consolidation  of  schools  meets  with  opposition  from  some 
of  the  people? 

Furthermore,  as  Dean  Bailey  points  out,  the  neighbor- 
hood may  indeed  be  losing  something  valuable  for  all  time. 
Unless  the  several  neighborhoods  whose  schools  are  con- 
solidated can  also  be  consolidated  into  a  correspondingly 
larger  community,  I  think  all  will  agree  that  each  neigh- 
borhood will  have  lost  something.  But,  even  at  best, 
there  are  likely  to  be  a  considerable  number  of  families 
who  are  unable  to  take  their  places  in  this  enlarged  com- 
munity. They  will  fail,  for  one  reason  or  another,  to  adjust 
themselves  to  the  new  conditions  which  have  been  created 
by  the  consolidation  of  their  schools.  This  failure  of  the 
people  to  adjust  themselves  is  apt  to  harden  their  prejudices 
against  the  whole  proposition  and  at  the  same  time  to  stir 
them  up  to  active  opposition. 

We  should  keep  in  mind  also  that  prejudice  against  the 
consolidation  of  schools  is  just  the  same  kind  of  thing  that 
has  always  stood  in  the  way  of  progress  of  whatsoever  kind. 
It  is  peculiar  neither  to  rural-school  progress  nor,  for  that 
matter,  to  the  rural  people.  I  beUeve  President  Eliot  has 
been  quoted  as  having  said  in  effect  that  it  took  him  the 
first  ten  years  of  his  administration  as  President  of  Har- 
vard University  to  win  over  the  faculty  of  that  institution 
to  his  programme  for  progress.  It  may  be  well  also  to  re- 
call in  this  connection  that  the  first  city  superintendent  in 
the  United  States  was  appointed  on  trial  at  Springfield, 
Mass.,  in  1849,  ^^^  ^^^^  2,fter  two  years  the  office  was 
abolished  for  the  reason  that  it  was  believed  to  be  a  useless 
expense.  Nearly  all  new  inventions  and  discoveries  have 
been  scoffed  at  at  first.     Unless  the  conservatism  and  the 


THE  DEFFICULTIES  OF  CONSOLIDATION  481 

prejudices  of  the  people  are  recognized  and  skilfully  and 
patiently  reckoned  with,  any  new  consolidated  school  is 
in  great  danger  of  becoming  a  failure. 

2.  The  Transportation  Problem. — The  problem  of  trans- 
portation is  perhaps  the  greatest  difficulty  of,  and  may 
result  in  the  greatest  danger  to,  the  consolidated  school. 
Doctor  Thomas  E.  Finegan  of  the  New  York  State  De- 
partment of  Education  (now  the  State  Superintendent  of 
Public  Instruction  in  Pennsylvania)  says:  "In  my  judgment 
the  principal  difficulty  is  the  question  of  transportation." 
Superintendent  W.  D.  Ross  of  Kansas  says:  "There  is  only 
one  real  difficulty  in  this  state  and  this  in  the  western  part 
where  it  is  sparsely  settled,  the  districts  there  being  very 
large;  and  any  move  to  consolidate  any  number  of  districts 
or  at  least  a  sufficient  number  to  make  it  economically 
worth  while  would  be  impossible,  owing  to  the  distance  chil- 
dren would  have  to  be  transported." 

What  Superintendent  Ross  says  of  the  western  part  of 
Kansas  describes  the  transportation  problem  over  a  large 
area  of  the  United  States,  particularly  in  mountainous 
states. 

Superintendent  H.  C.  Morrison  of  New  Hampshire 
throws  such  a  flood  of  light  upon  the  consolidation  of  schools 
in  New  England  that  I  have  taken  the  liberty  to  quote  at 
length  from  his  letter  under  date  of  December  8,  1916: 

I  was  an  enthusiastic  believer  in  that  plan  (consolidation  with 
transportation)  ten  years  ago,  but  as  experience  has  accumulated  it 
turns  out  to  be  feasible  only  in  rare  instances.  You  see  nearly  all  of 
Massachusetts  east  of  the  Connecticut  river,  the  southern  part  of 
New  Hampshire,  the  western  part  of  Maine,  and  practically  all  of 
Rhode  Island  and  Connecticut  have  been  settled  for  neady  three  hun- 
dred years.  The  rural  life  of  the  region  has  gone  through  several 
phases  which  have  resulted  in  creating  one  set  of  conditions  at  one 
time,  subsequently  revolutionizing  those  conditions  and  leaving  a 
wake  of  abandoned  farms  in  the  trail;  again  establishing  an  entirely 
new  set  of  conditions  on  the  old,  and  so  on.  The  result  is  that  in  a 
hilly  country  very  much  cut  up  by  watercourses,  we  have  public 


482  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

highways  running  in  every  direction  and  farms  so  scattered  that  it  is 
ordinarily  pretty  nearly  impossible  to  collect  children  with  the  trans- 
portation system  without  great  expense  and  without  starting  some  of 
them  to  school  very  early  in  the  morning.  This  is  particular!)'  true 
of  nearly  the  whole  of  this  state. 

What  we  do  find  is  this.  Occasionally  the  topography  of  a  region 
is  such  that  a  consolidated  school  can  be  established  at  a  central 
village  which  is  approached  from  all  parts  of  the  township  by  two  or 
three  radiating  lines  of  highways,  or  sometimes  the  village  is  on  a 
trunk  line  which  is  the  only  highway.  Under  these  conditions  two  or 
three  barges  will  pick  up  all  the  children  in  the  outlying  regions, 
bring  them  to  the  village  in  an  hour  or  less,  and  carry  them  home  with 
the  same  facility  and  expedition  at  the  end  of  the  day.  There  are  a 
few  cases  in  which  this  works  very  well,  and  in  such  cases  the  consoli- 
dated school  is  a  much  better  solution  of  the  rural-school  problem  than 
is  the  one-room  schoolhouse.  On  the  other  hand,  in  the  great  majority 
of  townships  such  a  practice  means  hardship  to  the  children.  It  means 
that  the  young  people  with  growing  famihes  of  children  will  move 
out  of  town,  and  do  move  out  of  town,  and  that  others  will  not  come 
in.  Consequently  the  economic  basis  of  the  whole  social  fabric,  in- 
cluding the  school  system,  falls  to  pieces. 

Furthermore,  the  transportation  system  under  such  conditions 
gets  so  complicated  that  it  is  beyond  the  capacity  of  the  average  local 
board  of  officers  to  manage.  They  easily  fall  into  ways  of  paying 
parents  for  carrying  their  own  children  to  school,  and  this  often  leads 
to  the  said  parents  holding  up  the  town  for  what  is  substantially  a 
rake-off.  Furthermore,  it  must  be  remembered  that  the  one-room 
school,  in  a  wholesome  and  sanitary  building,  with  a  course  of  study 
adapted  to  the  conditions,  with  a  daily  time-table  arranged  as  it  can 
very  easily  be  arranged  so  as  to  be  manageable,  with  a  trained  teacher 
in  service,  is  a  very  much  better,  because  a  very  much  more  flexible, 
institution  than  the  so-called  graded  school,  which  is  a  city  device 
with  its  lock-step  and  general  overloading  with  system  and  rigidity. 

So  this  department  is  advocating  to-day,  for  the  conditions  in  this 
state,  the  following  plan:  A  thoroughly  good  one-room  school  within 
walking  distance  of  as  many  children  as  possible,  with  a  course  of 
study  which  will  keep  the  children  there  as  long  as  is  consistent  with 
their  continued  progress,  and  a  secondary  school  within  driving  dis- 
tance of  as  many  children  as  possible.  We  are  now  just  beginning  to 
work  into  an  occasional  one-room  school  an  adaptation  of  the  junior 
high  school. 

It  ought  to  be  said,  however,  that  the  principles  which  I  have 
suggested  above  are  very  largely  dependent  upOn  the  peculiar  topog- 


THE  DimCULTIES  OF  CONSOLIDATION  483 

raphy  of  this  region  and  the  peculiar  conditions  of  its  settlement. 
I  should  expect  to  find  somewhat  similar  conditions  in  parts  of  your 
state,  but  perhaps  not.  Certainly  in  many  parts  of  the  west,  with  its 
flat  country,  rectangular  system  of  highways  and  scattered  population, 
I  cannot  see  how  they  could  manage  schools  effectively  in  any  other 
way  than  through  the  device  af  the  consolidated  school  and  a  trans- 
portation system. 

Superintendent  Francis  G.  Blair  of  Illinois  has  been 
good  enough  to  write  also  at  length  upon  the  situation  rela- 
tive to  consolidation  in  his  state  and  my  readers  will  wel- 
come his  wise  counsel: 

The  arguments  offered  against  consolidation  have  usually  taken 
substantially  the  following  forms: 

(i)  Consolidation,  to  be  effective,  requires  that  children  be  trans- 
ported in  wagons.  This  presupposes  a  condition  of  roads  which  will 
permit  of  transportation  throughout  the  school  year.  In  Illinois,  and 
especially  through  the  black  belt,  the  country  roads  are  practically 
impassable  for  loaded  wagons  during  about  two  months  of  the  school 
year.  With  the  coming  of  hard  roads,  this  objection  would  entirely 
disappear. 

(2)  The  fact  that  the  transporting  wagon  does  not  come  to  the 
door  of  the  homes  of  the  children,  but  picks  up  the  children  at  certain 
points  along  the  main  highway,  does  not  impress  the  parents  favora- 
bly. They  feel  that  it  will  require  as  much  care  on  their  part  to  dress 
their  children  and  send  them  to  a  certain  point  on  the  highway  as  it 
would  to  dress  them  so  that  they  may  walk  to  the  near-by  school. 
This  objection,  while  not  a  serious  one,  has  a  great  deal  to  do  in  de- 
termining the  attitude  of  the  parents. 

(3)  A  great  many  parents  who  have  had  no  experience  whatever 
in  the  transporting  of  children  in  wagons  see  all  sorts  of  dangers  in 
such  an  arrangement.  They  know  how  difficult  it  is  for  the  teacher 
to  control  the  children  in  the  schoolroom.  They  cannot  understand 
how  the  driver  of  a  wagon  can  control  a  group  of  those  children  under 
such  circumstances  as  will  obtain  in  a  wagon  traveUing  along  the 
country  road.  These  fears  can  only  be  allayed  by  the  presentation  of 
a  sufficient  amount  of  evidence  that  no  serious  disorders  arise  out  of 
this  plan. 

My  own  belief  is,  that  wherever  the  people  of  a  large  community 
have  become  conscious  of  their  community  interests  and  community 
needs  and  are  sufficiently  committed  to  a  community  programme  to 


484  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RITRAL  SCHOOL 

give  assurance  of  success,  in  such  a  community  a  consolidated  school 
is  not  only  possible,  but  desirable.  Those  who  would  use  the  consoli- 
dated school  as  an  instrument  for  community  soHdarity  have  much  on 
their  side.  The  serious  objection  to  it  is,  that  there  must  be  a  cer- 
tain amount  of  concord  before  the  school  can  be  established,  and  a 
very  great  degree  of  it  in  order  that  the  school  may  be  continued. 

Misconception  a  Factor. — To  be  sure,  a  great  many 
objections  to  transportation  are  raised  that  have  their 
existence  only  in  the  imaginations  of  the  people,  particu- 
larly of  the  mothers.  For  example,  mothers  wonder  what 
would  become  of  their  children  if  they  should  fall  ill  while 
so  far  from  home.  Nobody  will  blame  a  mother  for  feeling 
such  anxiety  as  this  about  her  children.  Of  course,  in  the 
best  managed  consolidated  schools  provisions  are  made 
for  the  care  of  any  who  may  fall  ill  while  at  school,  and  usually 
it  is  possible  for  the  driver  to  take  such  pupils  home  im- 
mediately, with  less  danger  than  if  a  sick  child  should  un- 
dertake to  walk  home  from  a  school  a  half-mile  away.  But 
the  mother  cannot  at  first  see  just  how  this  could  be  pos- 
sible. She  is  especially  anxious  about  her  children,  if  she 
does  not  happen  to  know,  and  have  confidence  in,  the 
principal  and  teachers  of  the  school,  and  the  driver  of  the 
wagon. 

In  the  colder  climates  parents  fear  that  their  children 
will  suffer  from  the  cold  while  in  transit,  or  while  waiting 
for  the  wagon  or  bus.  And,  indeed,  unless  proper  precau- 
tions are  taken  such  fear  may  be  well  founded.  There  are, 
of  course,  suitable  devices  for  warming  and  ventilating  the 
conveyances,  and  where  these  devices  are  installed  there 
can  be  no  serious  danger  to  the  children's  health,  certainly 
not  so  much  danger  as  would  be  the  case  where  the  children 
walk  muddy,  snowy  roads,  or  trudge  through  the  rain. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  not  an  easy  matter  to  convince  parents 
that  this  is  so.  And  suitable  little  storm  protectors  may  be 
built  with  a  few  boards  at  the  end  of  the  customary  lane 
where  the  children  wait  for  the  wagon. to  appear.    How- 


THE  DirnCULTIES   OF   CONSOLIDATION  485 

ever,  it  has  been  found  that  such  vehicles  seldom  vary 
more  than  five  minutes  from  schedule,  much  less  time  than 
it  would  take  to  trudge  to  the  abandoned  one-room  school 
over  muddy  or  snowy  roads  through  sleet  and  rain. 

The  attempt  to  transport  children  too  far  is  another 
serious  danger  of  the  transportation  of  pupils.  In  a  level 
country,  where  roads  are  good  enough  to  transport  by  means 
of  the  auto-bus,  fifteen  or  twenty  miles  may  not  be  too 
far  to  transport  the  children.  But  where  hills  and  ravines 
have  to  be  crossed,  and  where  wagons  or  vans  have  to  be 
drawn  by  horses  or  mules,  three  or  four  miles  may  really 
be  a  pretty  long  route.  The  late  Doctor  N.  C.  Schaeffer  of 
Pennsylvania  stated:  "Auto- vans  should  bring  the  children 
to  school  within  an  hour  after  they  leave  home.  The  plan 
does  not  work  well  when  children  must  leave  home  before 
daybreak  and  return  home  after  dark.''  I  am  sure  we  all 
agree  with  Doctor  Schaeffer.  And  no  one  can  fairly  blame 
parents  for  objecting  to  any  plan  that  puts  so  much  hardship 
upon  the  mother  as  getting  the  children  ready  to  start  to 
school  as  early  as  that.  Furthermore,  under  these  condi- 
tions the  children  are  unable  to  help  their  parents  in  the 
least  with  the  chores  about  the  home. 

Bad  Roads  a  Bar. — I  have  referred  only  indirectly  to 
perhaps  the  most  serious  difficulty  of  all,  namely,  bad  roads. 
Transportation  cannot  be  successfully  effected  except  by 
trolley  or  railroad,  unless  the  public  highways  are  in  fairly 
good  condition.  They  may  not  necessarily  be  hard  roads, 
but  they  must,  at  any  rate,  be  passable  with  a  loaded  wagon. 
I  am  convinced  that  a  great  many  mistakes  have  been 
made  by  undertaking  to  transport  children  over  almost  im- 
passable roads.  Consolidation  projects  are  usually  boosted 
at  the  time  of  year  when  the  roads  are  at  their  best,  with 
the  result  that  when  winter  comes  on  and  the  roads  get  at 
their  worst  the  troubles  begin  in  earnest,  and  the  plan  is 
then  laid  open  to  serious  criticism.  It  has  been  found  that 
consolidation  of  schools  helps  to  promote  the  improvement 


486  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL    SCHOOL 

of  the  roads,  and  doubtless  there  are  many  such  cases  on 
record,  but  if  one  is  charged  with  the  responsibility  of  a  con- 
solidation project,  he  would  prefer  to  have  the  roads  in 
fairly  good  condition  before  the  consolidation  took  place. 
Afterward,  consolidation  could  be  made  a  great  means  of  im- 
proving them  still  further. 

Pupils'  Conduct  on  the  Road. — Fear  of  bad  conduct 
among  the  children  while  being  transported  is  another 
difficulty  to  be  met.  Parents  are  not  willing  at  first  to  re- 
pose the  same  confidence  in  the  driver  of  the  conveyance 
that  they  have  been  accustomed  to  place  in  the  teachers. 
And  unless  boards  of  education  are  very  careful  in  selecting 
drivers  there  may  be  sufficient  grounds  to  justify  the  fears 
that  naturally  arise  in  the  minds  of  parents.  This  mis- 
giving is  the  more  plausible  because  of  the  existence  of 
different  classes,  even  of  different  races,  in  almost  every 
community.  Some  parents  do  not  want  their  children  to 
be  so  closely  associated  with  certain  other  children  as 
travelHng  together  in  a  closed  wagon  or  van  would  make 
necessary. 

I  mention  these  contingencies  not  because  I  believe 
that  many  of  them  may  not  be  successfully  met,  particularly 
if  sufficient  time  be  given,  but  because  I  regard  them  as 
some  of  the  real  prejudices  against  the  consoUdated  school. 
To  many  persons  they  may  seem,  indeed,  to  be  minor 
difficulties.  But  I  would  remind  them  that  these  are  pre- 
cisely the  points  that  parents  are  most  likely  to  pick  out  as 
the  most  serious  obstacles.  For  they  think  most  seriously 
of  the  things  which  touch  them  personally  through  their 
children,  and  in  the  homes.  They  are  points  which  must 
not  be  treated  lightly,  or  with  indifference.  The  transporta- 
tion of  pupils,  I  repeat,  may  present  the  greatest  difficulties 
to  be  met  by  the  consolidated  school. 

3.  The  Added  Expense. — The  increased  cost  of  the  con- 
solidated school  over  the  one-teacher  schools  is  another 
consideration  of  serious  danger  to  the  success  of  the  rural 


THE  DIFFICULTIES  OF  CONSOLIDATION  487 

consolidated  school.  In  almost  every  community  there  are 
a  few  citizens  who  object  strenuously  to  any  proposition 
which  would  probably  increase  their  taxes.  These  persons 
may  be  outvoted  or  overruled  in  the  decision  of  a  com- 
munity to  consoUdate  its  schools,  but  they  stand  ready  at 
all  times  to  ''strike  back'*  at  the  majority  by  finding  fault 
with  the  consoHdation  plan.  This  attitude  of  the  mi- 
nority toward  the  increase  in  tax  rates  for  the  support  of  the 
school,  no  matter  what  the  increased  advantages  purchased, 
is  a  constant  source  of  danger  to  any  consolidation  project. 
Persons  who  take  this  attitude  must  be  reasoned  with, 
and  this  can  be  done  only  by  finding  ways  of  convin(;ing 
them  that  their  money  is  really  yielding  them  and  the  com- 
munity greater  returns  in  terms  of  educational  facilities. 
And  this  cannot  be  done  by  merely  telling  them  of  the 
advantages  of  the  new  over  the  old.  They  must  be  shown. 
Pictures,  stereopticon  views,  moving  pictures,  and  the  like 
can,  of  course,  add  to  the  concreteness  of  the  propaganda. 
The  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education  will  lend  slides  for  a  stere- 
opticon. Later,  their  interest  must  be  aroused  by  deeds, 
not  by  preachments. 

Consolidated  Schools  Generally  More  Expensive. — I 
am  assuming,  of  course,  that  the  consohdated  school  is 
going  to  cost  more  than  did  the  one-teacher  schools  which 
have  not  been  consolidated.  My  position  on  this  question 
may  be  open  to  question.  For  example,  Major  A.  C.  Mona- 
han,  in  his  bulletin  on  "Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools," 
published  by  the  United  States  Bureau  of  Education  in 
1 9 14,  puts  it  this  way: 

Experience  in  consolidated  schools  proves  conclusively  that  the 
cost  of  education  per  child  per  day  in  such  schools  as  a  rule  is  much 
less  than  in  one-teacher  schools,  provided  that  largely  increased  salaries 
are  not  paid  to  the  teachers  in  the  consolidated  schools.  The  consoli- 
dated school  may  be,  and  usually  is,  made  more  expensive,  due  to  the 
fact  that  consolidation  follows  an  educational  awakening  which  de- 
mands not  so  much  centralization  of  buildings  as  the  educational  ad- 


488  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

vantages  made  possible  through  centraHzation:  Longer  terms,  better 
equipment,  trained  teachers,  supervising  principals,  and  the  addition 
of  high-school  grades. 

But  it  is  evident  that  it  is  necessary  to  pay  higher 
salaries  in  the  consolidated  school  if  we  would  have  better 
teachers,  and  that  if  the  consolidated  school  is  going  to  do 
all  the  things  we  promise,  it  will  at  least  have  ''longer  terms, 
better  equipment,  trained  teachers,  supervising  principals." 
For  unless  such  an  awakening  as  Major  Monahan  describes 
does  follow  or  accompany  consolidation,  it  would  be  doubt- 
ful whether  the  consolidation  would  be  of  itself  worth  the 
trouble  and  expense  which  are  required  to  establish  and 
maintain  it. 

In  the  same  bulletin  Major  Monahan  reproduces  statis- 
tics taken  from  the  report  of  the  State  Superintendent  of 
Indiana  for  191 2,  from  which  he  deduces  the  following: 

The  cost  of  schooling  per  child,  when  the  expense  of  transportation 
is  not  included,  is  $2.42  greater  in  the  district  schools  than  in  the 
consolidated  schools,  showing  that  the  district  schools  are  not  as  eco- 
nomical, as  far  as  the  cost  of  education  itself  is  concerned,  as  the  con- 
solidated schools.  When  the  transportation  is  included,  however,  the 
consolidated  schools  cost  $12.81  more  than  the  district  schools. 

This  point  is  not  entirely  conclusive.  Of  course,  the 
actual  teaching  would  cost  more  for  sixty  children  in  six 
separate  schools  than  it  would  if  these  sixty  children  were 
taught  by  two  teachers  in  a  two-room  consolidated  school. 
But  if  consolidation  means  also  transportation  of  pupils, 
then  we  must  include  the  item  of  transportation  in  our 
budget  of  expenses.  Likewise,  we  must  include  the  items  of 
the  teaching  of  special  subjects,  higher  salaries  for  trained 
teachers,  modern  equipment,  and  all  things  else  that  go 
with  a  modern  consolidated  school.  As  to  equipment, 
modern  practice  demands  a  well  with  a  force  pump,  base- 
ment, pressure  tank,  indoor  toilets,  drinking  fountains, 
cesspool   or  septic  tank,  etc.,  at  every  school.     To  make 


THE  DITFICULTIES   OF   CONSOLIDATION  489 

really  modern  the  single-room  schools  will  cost  far  more  than 
one  new  consolidated  building. 

My  conclusion  is,  therefore,  that  the  consolidated  school 
will  cost  more  than  the  present  one-teacher  schools  left  as 
they  are.  We  shall  then  have  to  prove  to  the  people  that 
our  new  plan  is  better  than  the  old.  This  we  can  do  (a)  by 
everlastingly  '^making  good''  with  the  children  them- 
selves, and  (b)  by  making  the  consolidated  school  a  social 
centre  for  the  whole  community. 

Making  good  with  the  children  is  discussed  in  the  fol- 
lowing paragraphs,  and  since  a  separate  chapter  of  this 
book  is  devoted  to  the  social  and  recreational  activities  of 
the  consolidated  rural  school,  we  shall  let  this  consideration 
pass  at  this  time  with  a  mere  statement. 

4.  The  Character  of  the  Teaching. — There  seems  to  be 
a  tendency  among  many  to  criticise  the  character  of  the 
teaching  in  many  consolidated  schools.  The  consolidated 
school  is  essentially  a  rural  school.  Therefore,  its  teaching 
should  be  closely  correlated  with  rural  Hfe,  particularly  with 
the  life  of  the  immediate  community.  Furthermore,  if  the 
teaching  be  correlated,  then  the  teachers  must  have  knowl- 
edge and  appreciation  not  only  of  the  philosophy  of  rural 
hfe  and  its  conditions,  but  also  of  the  rural  people  them- 
selves, their  outlook  upon  life  and  upon  the  world,  their 
attitude  toward  the  city,  their  habits  of  thought,  their  tra- 
ditions, their  occupations,  and  their  prejudices.  The  con- 
solidated school  is  not  merely  a  city-graded  school  set  up 
in  the  country,  but  a  new  and  separate  institution,  having 
new  and  different  opportunities,  responsibilities,  and  de- 
mands. 

Doctor  Thos.  E.  Finegan  of  Pennsylvania  expresses  this 
sentiment  forcibly  in  a  letter  dated  December  11,  191 6: 

Simply  consolidating  schools  does  not  make  good  schools.  If 
schools  are  consolidated,  qualified  teachers  must  be  employed,  and  the 
work  of  the  school  must  be  adapted  to  the  needs  of  the  community. 
Our  experience  is  that  when  the  farmers  realize  that  the  school  is  an 


490  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

asset  to  the  farm,  that  it  is  preparing  the  boys  and  girls  for  farm  work 
and  home  work,  and  that  the  school  is  actually  related  to  the  life  and 
work  of  the  farm,  improving  rural  conditions,  increasing  the  bulk  of 
the  farm  crops,  and  rendering  many  other  benefits,  the  school  will  be 
well  supported.  However,  if  poor  teachers  are  employed,  if  the  same 
old  courses  of  study  are  continued,  and  if  all  the  sins  and  shortcomings 
of  the  one-room  school  are  continued  in  the  larger  school,  on  an  en- 
larged plan,  the  school  will  be  properly  condemned. 

Superintendent  C.  H.  Lugg  of  South  Dakota  expresses 
the  same  sentiment  in  his  letter  of  December  13,  191 6: 

This  school  should  be  distinctively  a  rural  school  dealing  with 
rural  motives,  rural  conditions,  rural  topics,  and  rural  life  in  general. 
There  is  danger  that  much  of  the  good  work  the  school  ought  to  do 
will  be  spoiled  by  the  introduction  of  city  ideals,  city  motives,  and 
commercial  training  for  which  the  children  are  not  yet  prepared. 

The  chief  difficulty  lies  in  getting  the  proper  equipment  to  begin 
with,  and  then  in  securing  teachers  trained  for,  and  experienced  in, 
rural-school  work. 

The  principal  shortcoming  is  an  outgrowth  of  both  the  conditions 
just  mentioned.  It  is  the  introduction  of  city  ideals  under  the  guise 
of  culture,  while  instead  of  culture,  the  thing  introduced  is  an  arti- 
ficial glamour  that  does  not  really  exist  in  the  city,  but  which  tends  to 
render  the  country  pupil  dissatisfied  with  country  life,  and  to  make  him 
blind  to  the  great  opportunities  which  lie  round  about  that  life,  op- 
portunities for  culture  of  no  less  degree  than  the  city  can  ofifer,  oppor- 
tunities for  enterprise  that  excel  anything  the  city  can  ofifer,  oppor- 
tunities for  real  living  which  the  city  will  never  know. 

Mr.  J.  A.  Woodruff,  State  Inspector  of  Rural  Schools 
of  Iowa,  says: 

We  are  meeting  with  some  difficulty  in  securing  a  sufficient  num- 
ber of  men  who  seem  to  have  the  proper  view-point.  There  seems  to 
be  a  danger  that  young  men  who  have  had  their  preparation  along 
classical  lines  will  emphasize  this  line  of  work  to  the  detriment  of  sub- 
jects usually  classed  as  practical. 

These  statements,  coming  from  such  authorities  as  they 
do,  are  significant  to  those  of  us  who  have  the  responsi- 
bility of  directing  the  work  and  general  character  of  the 


THE  DIFFICULTIES   OF  CONSOLIDATION  49 1 

consolidated  school.  In  general,  it  seems  that  unless  the 
consolidated  school  can  be  made  a  different  school  from  the 
city  ward  school,  thoroughly  organized  to  achieve  a  different 
purpose,  then  we  had  better  not  abandon  the  Httle  rural 
school.  And  unless  the  teachers  have  the  view-point  of 
the  rural  people  among  whom  they  work,  or  unless  they  can 
acquire  this  view-point  quickly,  then  the  consolidated  rural 
school  will  probably  be  in  effect  a  failure,  even  though  it 
may  continue  to  work  indefinitely. 

Dearth  of  Trained  Rural  Leaders  a  Handicap. — Perhaps 
the  most  serious  difficulty  of  the  consolidated  schools,  so 
far  as  the  character  of  the  work  is  concerned,  is  the  dearth 
of  trained  rural  leaders  to  put  in  charge  of  them.  If  only 
the  principals  of  these  schools  were  properly  trained,  this 
dif&culty  would  be  very  largely  removed.  For  the  prin- 
cipal has  an  opportunity  to  train  the  other  teachers,  or  to 
eliminate  and  select  until  he  shall  have  built  up  a  strong 
corps  of  teachers  who  understand  the  very  hearts  of  the 
country  people,  and  the  soul  of  the  school  itself.  But  if 
there  be  no  leader  of  this  kind,  who  can  direct  and  redirect 
the  policy  and  work  of  the  school  in  accordance  with  its 
responsibilities,  then  the  situation  is  pretty  nearly  hope- 
less. 

The  departments  of  education  in  State  universities  and 
the  State  normal  schools  have  a  grave  responsibility  at  this 
point,  which,  I  think  we  must  admit,  is  not  met  in  every 
instance.  We  may  not  hope  that  all  of  the  teachers  can 
be  trained  in  universities  and  normal  schools.  But  we  may 
well  expect  that  these  institutions  will  give  a  little  more 
attention  to  the  training  of  rural  leaders,  who  may  in  turn 
train  the  teachers  under  their  direction,  and  at  the  same  time 
lead  the  people  of  the  rural  communities  to  a  better  under- 
standing both  of  the  conditions  surrounding  them  and  of 
the  opportunities  that  are  theirs,  if  only  they  know  how  to 
take  advantage  of  them.  However,  it  is  encouraging  to 
note  that  more  than  formerly  these  State  institutions  are 


492  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

undertaking  to  do  just  this  thing,  and,  indeed,  with  fine 
results. 

As  has  already  been  stated,  the  consolidated  school  is 
essentially  a  rural  institution.  Its  primary  aim  is  to  train 
for  country  living.  But  there  seems  to  be  a  sentiment 
among  many  rural  life  leaders  that  in  many  instances  this 
aim  is  not  followed;  that  instead  of  training  for  country 
Hfe,  the  consolidated  school  trains  away  from  the  country 
to  the  city.  This  sentiment  is  expressed  by  State  Rural 
School  Inspector  W.  S.  Dakin,  of  Connecticut,  in  the  fol- 
lowing statement  of  the  dangers,  difficulties,  and  shortcom- 
ings of  the  consolidated  school: 


Tendency  to  arouse  love  for  excitement  and  stimulate  interests 
that  draw  children  from  the  home  toward  the  town  and  city,  this  par- 
ticularly true  of  upper  grade  and  high-school  students. 

Tendency  to  cause  concentration  of  homes  in  the  community. 
The  estabhshed  poHcy  of  transportation  is  Hable  to  result  in  a  move- 
ment from  back  farms  to  those  on  the  transportation  lines  or  actually 
in  the  central  village,  and  discouragement  of  purchase  of  farms  where 
children  will  have  long  distances  to  travel. 

I  believe  that  in  this  latter  point,  the  tendency  toward  concen- 
tration, lies  one  of  the  most  serious  objections  to  the  consolidation  of 
rural  schools.  It  touches  on  a  matter  of  vital  economic  and  political 
significance.  We  lament  the  growth  of  city  and  town  life,  and  yet 
by  the  rigid  enforcement  of  state-wide  compulsory  attendance  laws, 
and  the  transportation  of  children  to  large  centres  through  consolida- 
tion of  schools,  we  are  quietly  but  most  assuredly  depopulating  country 
districts,  drawing  in  the  outsiders  who  might  and  should  remain  in 
the  rural  districts. 

The  policy  which  induces  the  railroad  to  run  hnes  into  open 
country  as  a  preparation  for  settlement  might  well  be  followed  by 
state  school  systems  through  the  establishment  in  remote  districts 
of  excellent,  well-equipped  schools,  these  to  be  placed  not  according 
to  the  actual  enrollment  at  the  present  time,  but  according  to  the 
general  economic  possibilities  of  the  section.  Only  in  that  way  will 
people  ambitious  for  the  welfare  of  their  children  be  induced  to  occupy 
lands  remote  from  live  cities  and  villages.  We  have  brought  to  them 
the  rural  free  delivery  and  the  telephone,  but  have  taken  away  a 
highly-prized  privilege,  good  local  schools. 


Students  in  costumes  for  a  play  which  they  produced  in  connection  with 
their  graduation  exercises,  Manila,  P.  I. 


Float  representing  the  San  Andres  primary  school  in  the  floral  parade,  Philip- 
pine carnival,  Manila,  1915.  Freed  from  many  hampering  traditions  rural 
education  in  the  Philippines  has  made  great  progress 


THE  DIFFICULTIES   OF  CONSOLIDATION  493 

The  Little  Country  School  Still  Has  Friends.— There  is 
danger  also  of  attaching  too  much  importance  to  the  con- 
solidated school  as  compared  with  the  one-teacher  schools. 
I  think  very  few  students  of  rural-school  organization  fail 
to  recognize  that  the  consolidated  school,  if  properly  di- 
rected, is  a  better  school  than  the  average  one-teacher  school, 
if  for  no  other  reason  than  the  better  facilities  for  teaching. 
But  since  the  advent  of  the  consolidated  school,  the  one- 
teacher  school  has  lost  caste.  We  are  apt  to  do  and  say 
things  to  discredit  it.  As  a  result,  the  people  come  to  be-* 
lieve  that  their  little  school  doesn't  amount  to  much. 
Teachers  do  not  like  to  teach  in  a  school  which  has  fallen 
into  disrepute.  But  this  type  of  school  still  has  many 
friends,  and  if  we  say  too  harsh  things  about  it  in  our  praise 
of  the  consolidated  school,  these  friends  of  their  little  school 
may  "strike  back"  hard  at  the  newer  t3rpe  of  school. 

Furthermore,  we  must  be  mindful  that  the  little  country 
schools  far  outnumber  the  consolidated  schools,  and  will 
continue  to  do  so  for  many  years  to  come.  There  are  thou- 
sands of  one-teacher  schools  where  there  are  only  hundreds 
of  consoHdated  schools.  So  long  as  the  proportion  is  so 
largely  in  favor  of  the  little  country  schools,  it  behooves  us 
as  leaders  to  have  due  regard  for  its  rights  and  true  recog- 
nition both  of  its  achievements  and  of  its  possibilities. 

The  Small  Graded  School. — Up  to  this  point  we  have 
constantly  had  in  mind  the  consolidated  school  which  has 
been  composed  of  several  one-teacher  country  schools, 
whose  children  are  now  being  transported  to  the  central 
school.  There  is  another  type  of  consolidated  school  which, 
in  mountainous  sections  and  in  thickly  settled  communities, 
may  more  nearly  meet  the  real  needs  than  the  larger  school 
where  transportation  is  provided.  This  is  the  graded  school 
of  from  two  to  four  teachers,  where  all  the  pupils  are  so 
situated  that  they  can  walk  to  the  central  school  with  a  dis- 
tance of  not  over  about  two  miles.  Some  boards  of  educa- 
tion have  been  trying  to  accommodate  every  family  in  their 


494  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

districts,  and  have  gone  on  building  one-teacher  schools 
almost  without  number.  Now  we  understand,  and  the 
people  pretty  well  understand,  that  there  is  a  decided  ad- 
vantage in  so  organizing  a  school  that  one  teacher  shall 
have  not  over  three  grades.  It  is  comparatively  easy  for 
rural  people  to  understand  what  is  meant  when  one  explains 
that  no  teacher  can  teach  well  the  eight  grades  of  the  ele- 
mentary school,  and  that  the  work  can  be  done  very  much 
better  by  two,  three,  or  four  teachers,  each  having  from  two 
to  three  grades.  It  is  also  easy  for  them  to  see  that  one  or 
two  miles  is  not  too  far  for  the  youngsters  to  walk.  This 
proposition  appeals  to  the  people  very  much  more  strongly 
than  the  proposition  of  establishing  a  large  consolidated 
school  and  hauling  the  children  from  three  to  five  or  six 
miles  at  public  expense. 

Under  such  conditions  it  may  also  be  possible  to  have 
the  older  children  go  to  a  central  school  for  upper-grade 
work  and  to  let  the  smaller  children  go  to  the  school  of  their 
respective  neighborhoods.  In  this  way  the  advantages  of 
a  graded  school  will  be  gained  and  no  hardships  will  be  in- 
flicted upon  the  little  folks  who  are  yet  unable  to  walk  to 
the  central  school.  In  Wayne  County,  West  Virginia,  for 
example,  by  petitioning  boards  of  education  the  people  have 
secured  the  consolidation  of  sixty  of  their  one-teacher 
country  schools  into  twenty-eight  of  these  small  graded 
schools.  And  there  are  in  the  hands  of  some  of  the  boards 
of  education  petitions  which  have  been  waiting  their  turn 
for  as  many  as  three  or  four  years.  The  demand  comes 
from  the  people  themselves,  and  the  boards  of  education 
have  some  hard  times  explaining  why  they  find  it  necessary 
to  wait  a  year  or  two  before  the  boards  can  grant  their 
petitions.  A  large  number  of  the  difficulties  of  the  larger 
type  of  consolidated  school  are  not  found  in  connection 
either  with  the  establishing  or  with  the  maintenance  of 
these  smaller  graded  schools.  Perhaps  a  very  good  way  to 
effect  the  more  complete  form  of  consolidation  is  by  begin- 
ning with  the  small  graded  school. 


THE   DIFFICULTIES   OF    CONSOLIDATION  495 

Perhaps  our  greatest  need  in  rural  education  is  expert 
and  sufficient  supervision  of  teachers.  In  the  consolidated 
school  the  principal  has  this  responsibility.  But,  as  shown 
in  Baltimore  County,  Md.,  sufficient  expert  supervision 
can  be  had  without  consolidation. 

RESUME 

Stated  briefly,  the  practicability  of  the  consolidated  rural 
school  lies  in  its  adaptation  to  local,  or  at  least  sectional, 
conditions. 

That  this  type  of  rural  school  has  its  shortcomings  ap- 
pears to  be  the  sentiment  of  our  rural  leaders  throughout 
the  country. 

Clearly  it  has  also  many  dangers  in  its  path,  and  many 
difficulties  to  be  met. 

The  ability  to  overcome  its  shortcomings,  once  it  is 
established,  depends  upon  (i)  whether  it  is  wise  to  consoli- 
date in  the  first  place,  (2)  whether  the  administration  of  its 
affairs  is  of  the  highest  order,  (3)  whether  its  teachers  are 
persons  inspired  with  the  spirit  of  the  country  and  pre- 
pared for  this  peculiar  kind  of  leadership,  and  (4)  whether 
the  supervision  and  leadership  which  they  get  is  of  a  high 
order. 

The  consolidation  idea  is  good.  If  the  idea  can  be 
successfully  put  into  practice  the  country  youth  who  come 
under  its  influence  will  have  such  an  educational  oppor- 
tunity as  perhaps  no  other  type  of  school  offers.  The  fol- 
lowing chapter  takes  up  some  of  the  leading  constructive 
features  which  will  make  of  the  consolidated  school  a  real 
rural-education  plant. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Betts   and  Hall—"  Better  Rural   Schools,"   part   IV.    The  Bobbs- 

Merrill  Co. 
Brogden — "Consolidation  of  Schools  and  Transportation  of  Pupils." 

Department  of  Education,  Raleigh,  N.  C. 


496  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Burnham— "Two  Types  of  Rural  Schools."  Teachers'  CoUege,  Co- 
lumbia University. 

Foght— "The  American  Rural  School,"  part  XV.  The  Macmillan 
Company. 

Knorr — "Consolidated  Rural  Schools  and  Organization  of  a  County 
System."     U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education,  No.  232. 

Monahan — "Consolidation  of  Schools  and  Transportation  of  Pupils 
at  Public  Expense."    U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education,  No.  30. 


CHAPTER  XXII 
THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL 

I.    The  Future  of  the  Consolidated  School 

The  future  of  the  consolidated  school  is  very  bright. 
It  is  rapidly  winning  its  way  into  the  hearts  of  rural  people, 
and  it  is  each  year  adding  considerably  to  its  efficiency.  A 
pioneer  movement  must  unfortunately  present  to  people 
for  their  approval  only  the  primary  stages  of  a  new  devel- 
opment. The  first  automobiles  were  not  highly  attractive 
and  the  first  consolidated  schools  were  by  no  means  as 
efficient  and  broad  in  their  rural  social  service  as  such  schools 
will  in  fifty  years  become.  Nine  million  dollars  or  more 
should  annually  be  spent  by  the  federal  government,  and 
the  amounts  should  be  more  than  equalled  by  the  state 
governments  in  establishing  model  and  experimental  con- 
solidated schools  in  various  parts  of  the  country,  from  sea 
to  sea.  From  carefully  directed  experiment,  wide  and 
thorough  study  of  the  movement,  and  from  a  high  class  of 
inventive  genius  in  the  work,  we  should  in  a  few  decades 
elaborate  a  type  of  consolidated  rural  school  that  would 
be  even  more  serviceable  than  the  best  city  schools.  The 
rural  school  need  prepare  for  but  one  principal  vocation 
in  a  community,  while  the  city  must  prepare  for  very  many. 
Perhaps  the  ideal  American  school  to  be  shown  foreign 
visitors  of  the  future  will  be  our  rural  consolidated  school. 

Roads. — Such  a  school  needs  good  roads,  and  it  will, 
in  turn,  promote  good  roads.  If  the  school  bus  has  to 
miss  reaching  the  school  a  week  or  more  each  school  year 
because  of  the  bad  roads,  the  roads  are  bound  to  be  im- 
proved.     The   consolidated-school    centre   makes   possible 

497 


498  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

effective  public  discussion  and  leadership  in  getting  better 
highways.  If  the  snow-drifts  bother,  snow  fences  such  as 
are  used  along  railways  will  be  constructed.  If  deep  mud 
stalls  the  machine,  the  civics  classes  will  have  before  them  a 
good  practical  problem.  Some  one  has  recommended  a 
kind  of  military  training,  without  the  "gun- to  ting"  features, 
of  all  boys  of  high-school  age,  which  will  set  such  young 
huskies  at  healthful  labor  for  the  public  good.  From  one 
to  three  months  camping  out  and  working  in  the  construc- 
tion of  good  roads  each  year  might  be  a  part  of  the  pro- 
gramme with  benefit  to  all.  Great  national  highways  and 
the  principal  arteries  of  transportation  might  be  developed 
as  by-products  of  such  military,  physical,  and  civic  educa- 
tion. Let  not  the  lack  of  the  best  roads  too  much  retard 
the  consolidated  school. 

The  consolidated-school  plant  will  be  worthy  of  the 
large  community  which  it  serves.  It  will  draw  its  support 
from  generous  State,  county,  and  local  funds.  Perhaps 
federal  aid  may  be  also  obtained.  The  assessed  valuation 
of  the  community  territory  will  be  little  less  than  a  half 
million  dollars,  and  the  school  population  may  confidently 
be  expected  to  increase  far  beyond  the  present.  When 
we  see  populations  abroad  as  great  as  our  own  country 
living  in  areas  little  larger  than  one  or  two  of  our  States, 
we  may  expect  before  long  a  doubling  and  a  trebling  of  our 
present  hundred  million  population.  Because  of  the  grow- 
ing high  cost  of  farm  products,  and  the  great  proportion  of 
city  dwellers,  over  half  of  the  population,  the  rural  regions, 
will  get  their  full  share  of  this  increase  of  population.  As 
roads  and  automobiles  improve,  the  distances  pupils  can 
be  hauled  will  be  increased  and  thus  double  forces  will  in- 
crease consolidated-school  attendance. 

The  Farm. — There  will  be  a  farm  at  the  school  (i)  to 
furnish  a  definite  means  of  keeping  the  principal  and  teach- 
ers in  close  touch  with  farm  problems,  (2)  to  provide  a  de- 
sirable addition  to  what  is  always  the  school-teacher's  low 


THE  NEW   CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL 


499 


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salary,  (3)  to  retain  a  more  permanent  teaching  force,  (4)  to 
provide  for  a  demonstration  farm  and  home  to  show  what 
can  be  done  in  the  country,  (5)  to  provide  for  the  equivalent 
of  an  agricultural  experiment  station,  (6)  to  provide  homes 
for  the  principal,  teachers,  janitor,  and  perhaps  other 
workers,  such  as  those  who  drive  the  cars  and  work  on  the 


500  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

farm,  (7)  to  provide  school  gardening  and  other  manual 
labor  for  the  children,  (8)  to  provide  an  athletic,  field-day, 
picnic,  and  recreation  centre  for  the  community,  (9)  to  pro- 
vide grounds  for  a  community  fair  such  as  the  county  fairs 
in  some  sections  of  the  country,  and  (10)  to  provide  a  central 
meeting-place  for  both  the  people  of  the  village  trading- 
centre  and  the  farmers,  whose  interests  are  mutual,  and  who 
greatly  need  such  a  place  and  excuse  for  getting  together 
in  a  wholesome,  interested,  co-operative  manner. 

The  school-building  will  probably  be  a  one-story  struc- 
ture, with  a  flat  roof,  partly  lighted  from  above.  It  will  be 
located  on  the  front  part  of  the  farm,  with  its  long  axis 
running  north  and  south  to  provide  east  and  west  Hghting 
for  the  classrooms.  Such  a  structure  can  be  added  to  at 
will,  and  has  many  otter  advantages  in  cost,  construction, 
and  adaptability.  Sooner  or  later  it  will  have  a  good  audi- 
torium, a  first-class  gymnasium  with  showers  and  a  swim- 
ming-pool, a  good  library,  study  halls  probably  in  con- 
nection with  the  library,  a  room  for  a  permanent  exhibit 
of  farm  products,  agricultural,  botanical,  chemical,  and 
physical  laboratories,  domestic  science  and  manual-training 
departments,  teachers*  retiring-rooms,  principal's  office, 
regular  classrooms  for  elementary  and  high-school  pupils, 
both  groups  on  the  six-six  plan,  a  medical  or  health  room 
for  the  school  nurse  and  county  supervisor  of  health  and 
physical  development,  a  lunch-room,  motion-picture  ap- 
paratus, and  good  stage  in  the  auditorium,  and  other  features 
as  good  as  those  provided  as  a  matter  of  course  in  cities. 

The  Curriculum. — The  studies  will  not  be  selected  be- 
cause some  European  school  used  them  during  the  last 
century,  nor  because  a  conservative  or  reactionary  college 
requires  them  for  entrance.  The  passage  from  the  high 
school  to  the  State  higher  institutions  will  be  as  simple  and 
sensible  as  the  passage  from  the  six-year  elementary  school 
to  the  six-year  high  school.  Neither  will  the  programme 
of  studies  be  a  cheap  imitation  of  city-school  curricula. 


THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL  501 

The  consolidated  school  is  to  win  a  distinctness  and  self- 
reliance  that  is  based  on  a  clear  understanding  of  its  special 
function  and  of  how  its  work  should  be  done.  Its  text- 
books will  be  written  by  successful  teachers  in  such  schools 
who  have  for  a  number  of  years  brought  together  and 
psychologically  arranged  subject-matter  that  they  have 
proved  hits  the  mark  of  the  five  great  aims  of  rural  education. 
These  texts  will  provide  for  much  local  adaptation  and  selec- 
tion of  community  problems  that  especially  need  solution. 
The  courses  of  study  will  be  full  of  suggestions  and  methods 
of  accomplishing  and  measuring  results.  It  will  not  be  a 
bare,  skeleton  outline  of  dead  subject-matter.  In  adminis- 
tering the  course  no  traditional  and  vague  aims  such  as 
formal  discipHne,  culture,  scholarship,  and  other  unanalyzed 
aims  either  psychologically  or  sociologically  misleading  will 
govern.  Real  culture  of  real  rural  people  will  be  secured, 
but  it  will  not  be  divorced  from  the  most  technical  and  ex- 
acting social  efficiency  in  the  rural  environment.  Neither 
will  it  attempt  to  lead  good  prospective  farmers  and  farmers' 
wives  away  from  the  country  by  a  schooling  idealizing 
only  the  overcrowded  professions  and  the  rather  illusory 
successes  of  city  life.  It  will  be  a  curriculum  *^of  the  people, 
for  the  people,  and  by  the  people.'' 

The  drivers  of  the  auto-busses  or  horse  hacks  will  be 
competent,  dependable  men  or  women  who  will,  in  many 
cases,  be  permanently  connected  with  the  school.  There 
will  be  a  good  large  garage  for  all  the  busses,  hacks,  horses, 
buggies,  bicycles,  and  motorcycles  used.  We  shall  not, 
until  the  revised  edition  of  this  volume  appears,  suggest  a 
hangar  for  aeroplanes.  No  machine  of  man  is,  however, 
being  more  rapidly  developed  to-day,  and  the  aeroplane  is 
not  obstructed  by  "bad  roads  and  high  hills."  The  lunch- 
room in  connection  with  the  home-economics  department  of 
the  school  will  be  used  by  most  of  the  pupils  and  teachers 
for  the  midday  meal.  The  electricity  used  will  be  produced 
in  the  building  if  it  is  not  available  outside.     The  heating 


502  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

plant  of  the  building  will  be  somewhat  separated  from  the 
main  building  for  greater  safety  from  fires.  The  building 
will  be  fireproof  in  construction  because  of  the  usual  total 
absence  of  a  convenient  or  satisfactory  fire  department  in 
the  small  town.  About  two  buildings  destroyed  by  fire  a 
day  is  our  present  rate.  Water  will  be  pumped  from  deep 
wells  to  a  reservoir,  and  plenty  of  water  will  be  furnished 
all  parts  of  the  building  for  drinking-fountains,  modern 
toilets,  cooking,  agriculture  and  botany,  drawing,  and 
other  purposes. 

The  Teachers. — Here,  with  principal  and  teachers  who 
are  normal-school  and  college  graduates,  thoroughly  in 
sympathy  with  and  understanding  farm  life,  happy,  perma- 
nent, and  satisfied  in  their  work,  with  school  directors  and 
patrons  who  give  encouragement  rather  than  knocks,  the 
great  efficiencies  demanded  by  modern  democracy  will  begin 
to  be  developed  for  the  first  time  in  the  history  of  education. 
A  nation  of  healthy,  happy  people,  efficient  in  their  voca- 
tions, joyous  in  their  avocations,  progressive  and  skilled  in 
their  civic  relations,  and  filled  with  the  social-service  spirit, 
will  be  the  natural  output  of  the  consolidated  school  of  the 
future. 

To  emphasize  our  previous  stress  of  the  importance  of  a 
suitable  school  plant  we  add  here  in  closing  a  farewell  word 
on: 

II.    The  One-Story  School 

As  previously  suggested,  the  consolidated  rural-school 
building  that  is  thoroughly  adapted  to  its  purposes  and 
environment  will  probably  be  a  one-story  structure.  The 
sixteen  principles  or  **  standards  "  which  have  been  set  up 
in  Chapter  IX  for  such  a  school,  combined  with  present 
theories  of  lighting,  ventilation,  class  management,  and 
child  hygiene,  point  inevitably,  it  seems,  to  the  one-story 
type  as  the  best  solution.     Up  to  the  present,  most  of  the 


THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL  503 

one-story  school-buildings  of  any  considerable  size  have 
been  erected  in  towns  and  cities  where  the  cost  of  the  land 
is  a  deterrent  factor,  and  where  the  building  and  play- 
ground must  in  most  cases  conform  to  the  shape  and  narrow 
confines  of  a  city  block.  In  numerous  instances  not  even 
a  full  block  (around  300  feet  square)  is  acquired  for  both 
building  and  playground.  Nearly  all  the  leading  school 
architects  have  made  their  inventions  within  such  limi- 
tations, and  their  buildings,  although  very  suggestive,  are 
practically  never  suitable  for  rural  conditions. 

Out  in  the  open  country  or  near  a  rural  village  or  town 
where  land  is  not  divided  into  blocks,  and  where  the  land 
cost  is  relatively  a  minor  matter,  the  one-story  school-build- 
ing can  grow  naturally  into  the  form  best  calculated  to  meet 
the  many  requirements  of  twentieth-century  rural  hygiene 
and  rural  education.  The  best  one-story  schools  so  far 
erected  in  cities  have  many  points  of  superiority  over  the 
higher  buildings  with  basements.  But  if  a  one-story  build- 
ing with  proposed  extensions  robs  children  of  needed  play- 
ground space,  the  city  may  well  use  the  two-story-with- 
basement  type.  If  one  will  examine  critically  a  number  of 
the  best  one-story  buildings  in  cities  or  the  plans  which  are 
published,  he  will  note  a  more  crowded-together  structure 
than  is  desirable  for  the  best  ventilation  by  natural  means. 
And  natural  means  of  ventilation  for  a  number  of  reasons 
are,  and  will  be,  used  much  of  the  year  in  most  schools, 
especially  in  mild,  warm,  and  summer  weather.  A  country 
consolidated  school  will,  at  the  least,  use  its  auditorium  once 
a  week  for  community  gatherings  throughout  the  summer. 
It  would  not  be  good  economy  to  start  the  fans  running 
for  the  building  or  the  assembly-room  alone  if  this  expense 
could  be  avoided  by  wise  provisions  in  building  plans. 

In  these  one-story  buildings  in  cities,  the  auditorium- 
gymnasium  wing  is  usually  built  up  against  the  corridors 
of  the  end  wings  of  the  prevalent  E-type  building.  This 
construction  cuts  this  middle  wing  off  from  exposure  to  the 


504  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

breeze,  except  above  the  level  of  the  classrooms,  and  means, 
when  fans  are  not  running,  dead  air  and  a  stagnation  of  ven- 
tilation. For  a  community  motion-picture  or  other  meet- 
ing, in  the  spring  and  summer  especially,  this  plan  would 
be  bad,  resulting  in  all  the  evils  of  *' stuffy  rooms.''  Some 
of  these  country  buildings  are  used,  as  they  should  be,  for 
community,  non-sectarian  ethical,  social,  and  religious 
meetings  on  Sunday  throughout  the  year,  as  described  in 
Chapter  XII.  In  the  South  and  Far  West  it  is  especially 
necessary  to  secure  at  all  times  free  cross-ventilation,  and 
even  with  this,  overhead,  large-bladed  fans  in  constant 
motion  are  quite  frequently  needed.  In  the  tropics  they 
are  indispensable  for  effective  educational  work. 

As  permanent  fixtures  in  warm  climates,  the  writer  has 
seen  the  possible  beneficent  influence  of  auditorium  meet- 
ings of  many  kinds  ruined  by  surrounding  this  middle 
wing  on  three  sides  with  a  two-story  structure  even  as  far 
away  as  forty  feet,  leaving  a  considerable  patio  on  either 
side.  Were  it  not  for  the  severe  winters  of  many  of  our 
States,  and  for  the  fact  that  school  boards  are  beginning  to 
show  hygienic  good  sense  in  installing  and  running  fans, 
either  local  for  each  room  or  one  for  the  entire  building,  in 
mild  and  warm  weather,  it  would,  indeed,  be  a  good  plan 
to  get  the  auditorium-gymnasium-library-lunchroom  wing 
out  entirely  free  from  any  obstructions  to  the  natural  ven- 
tilating forces  in  devising  a  common,  standard  type  of  build- 
ing. Even  though  the  auditorium  group  is  two  stories  in 
height,  and  the  upper  part  of  the  high  rooms  is  above  the 
rest  of  the  structure,  this  is  not  suj65cient.  Neither  is  a 
narrow  patio,  or  court,  on  either  side  enough.  Probably 
not  less  than  thirty  to  forty  feet  of  open  space,  measuring 
from  the  inside  corridors  to  the  central  wing  of  the  E  type, 
on  either  side,  will  be  found  necessary  with  one-story  class- 
rooms. An  alternative  type  of  building  would  be  one  in 
the  shape  of  the  letter  U,  with  the  auditorium  group  making 
the  junction  along  the  front  between  the  two  end  wings  of 


THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL        505 

classrooms.     How  to  make  this  architecturally  attractive 
might  be  somewhat  of  a  problem,  but  it  can  be  solved. 

The  single  row  of  classrooms,  flanked  by  a  corridor 
which  may,  if  necessary,  be  enclosed  in  glass  in  severe 
weather,  and  left  quite  open  like  an  ordinary  porch  with 
colonnade  the  remainder  of  the  year,  is  desirable  largely 
for  ventilation  reasons,  although  it  has  its  educational 
advantages.  The  ordinary  building  with  two  parallel  rows 
of  classrooms  and  a  corridor  between,  lacks  the  means  of 
cross-ventilation,  especially  when  there  are  no  windows 
opening  from  classrooms  into  the  hall.  In  such  a  building 
it  is  highly  desirable  to  have  above  the  blackboards,  under 
easy  control  by  teachers,  a  row  of  single-sash  windows  open- 
ing into  the  corridor.  In  many  cases  it  has  been  found 
desirable  to  cut  such  windows  through  these  walls  after 
buildings  conforming  to  the  old  standard  of  unilateral 
lighting  (and  ventilation)  have  been  erected.  We  have 
contended  in  the  American  School  Board  Journal,  The 
A  merican  Journal  of  School  Hygiene,  and  elsewhere  for  some 
time  that  unilateral  ventilation  is,  for  much  of  the  year, 
in  the  typical  school,  exceedingly  poor  ventilation,  since  it 
does  not  provide  for  circulation  by  cross-currents  of  air. 
In  most  unilaterally  lighted  schools  there  are  great  dead-air 
spaces  in  that  third  of  each  room  at  the  rear  and  right  of 
pupils  as  seated.  Even  healthy,  vigorous  children  should  not 
be  compelled  to  sit  in  such  stagnant,  "stuffy''  air.  In  many 
cases  it  will  be  found  that  teachers  have  more  or  less  vaguely 
sensed  this  condition,  and  have  adjusted  pupils  to  it.  In 
many  cases  the  pupils  in  this  third  of  the  room  are  occasion- 
ally blamed  for  listlessness  or  other  symptoms  of  bad  ven- 
tilation when  they  would  show  no  such  symptoms  if  changed 
to  the  front  of  the  room  where  the  windows  on  one  side 
and  the  door  on  the  right  front  leading  to  the  hall  make  a 
cross-current  of  air.  Teachers  should  demand  windows 
above  the  blackboard  on  the  hall  side  under  such  conditions. 
If  the  unilateral-lighting  fad  which  has  been  so  dogmatically 


5o6  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

standardized  by  administrators  and  theorists  more  efficient 
in  issuing  edicts  and  ** standards"  than  in  doing  construc- 
tive thinking  and  inventing  must  be  followed,  a  second  door 
should  also  be  added  opening  into  the  corridor  near  the 
rear  of  the  room  in  order  to  save  the  health  of  pupils  much 
of  each  year  when  fans  are  not  running.  One  door  near  the 
front  with  windows  above  the  right-hand  blackboard  would, 
for  many  reasons  of  hygiene  and  class  management,  be 
preferable.  With  such  high  windows  and  with  both  windows 
and  a  door  on  the  left  of  pupils  we  have  the  best  features  of 
an  open-air  school. 

III.    Advantages  and  Special  Features 

Some  of  the  principal  advantages  and  special  features 
of  the  one-story  consolidated  school  may  here,  for  brevity, 
be  stated  numerically.  Only  the  leading  features  will  be 
noted  which  apply  especially  to  the  consolidated  rural 
school.  The  matter  has  been  dealt  with  briefly  in  Chapter 
IX.  The  accompanying  floor  plan  is  based  on  these  prin- 
ciples, and  would,  if  ably  followed  and  adopted,  to  a  large 
extent  bring  about  the  following  advantages  and  condi- 
tions: 

I.  Greater  safety  from  fire  and  panic  is  provided  than  in 
buildings  with  two  or  more  stories  and  basements.  In 
the  country,  without  skilled  fire-fighting  agencies  close  at 
hand,  this  precaution  is  fundamental.  All  walls  and  floors 
can  easily  be  made  fireproof.  No  space  is  left  for  wood 
construction  or  combustibles  below  the  children,  since  there 
is  no  basement,  and  the  main  floors  may  be  made  of  con- 
crete on  a  cinder  or  other  filling.  In  classrooms  this  con- 
crete floor  may  by  proper  prearrangements  be  covered 
with  ordinary  wooden  flooring.  Each  classroom  has  exits 
directly  to  the  playground  {a)  through  a  door  on  the  left 
of  the  pupils  as  seated,  {h)  through  the  door  and  corridor 
into  the  court  on  the  right,  or  {c)  out  of  the  windows  scarcely 


CONSOUDATn)  ?URAL  SCHOOL  BaHlHW  ai»  COMMUNITr  OKTrR 


507 


5o8  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

four  feet  above  the  ground  on  the  left.  Such  a  sufficiency 
of  exits  would  meet  the  most  stringent  fire  regulations  of 
cities,  and  would  serve  several  other  functions  besides. 
The  short  jump  from  the  windows  should  be  without  in- 
jurious effects  to  most  country  children,  especially  where 
effective  gymnasium  training  has  contributed  to  agility, 
hardihood,  and  courage  in  jumping  such  a  slight  distance. 
Plentiful  exits  from  the  assembly  wing  can  also  easily  be 
provided,  opening  into  the  courts  on  either  side. 

The  heating  plant  would  be  in  a  separate  fireproof 
room  at  the  rear  of  the  building,  or  separated,  as  in  the 
writer's  floor  plan  presented  later. 

There  is  no  good  reason  why  most  such  schools  should 
not  be  built  almost  entirely  of  concrete.  Farm  people 
to-day  need  constant  building  object-lessons  in  the  use  of 
this  indispensable  ally  of  the  progressive  agriculturist.  A 
standard  type  of  building  such  as  is  here  suggested  could  be 
designed,  steel  or  cast  plates  made  for  it,  and  these  moved 
to  different  parts  of  a  State  whenever  such  a  building  was 
to  be  erected.  The  concrete  could  be  poured  into  the 
moulds  formed  with  such  plates,  and  the  latter  would  be 
practically  indestructible.  Sand,  gravel,  and  rock  for  crush- 
ing are  usually  convenient,  either  on  or  beneath  the  surface 
of  the  ground.  In  any  event,  complete  plans  and  speci- 
fications for  such  model,  indestructible  buildings  should  be 
available  free  of  charge  at  the  office  of  the  State  Superin- 
tendent of  Education. 

2.  Overhead  lighting  can  be  provided  for  all  classrooms. 
Devices  for  such  lighting  have  been  perfected  until  it  is 
now  safe  to  recommend  the  system  strongly.  The  dangers 
of  rain  coming  in,  of  snow  and  dirt  obstructing  the  light, 
of  too  much  light  and  heat,  and  of  high  winds  or  tornadoes 
tearing  off  the  apparatus,  have  all  been  successfully  obvi- 
ated. Window  space  should  not  be  lessened  because  of  such 
top  lighting,  since  windows  are  still  necessary  for  ventila- 
tion.    There  is  danger  of  overlooking  this- point,  as  demon- 


THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL  509 

strated  by  a  number  of  ''closed-air  chambers"  constructed 
as  classrooms  by  men  who  considered  the  overhead  lighting 
sufficient,  as  it  may  have  been  as  lighting  only,  but  who 
overlooked  the  needs  of  children  for  air-currents,  "the  breath 
of  Hfe,"  which  can  only  be  satisfied  in  most  schools  by 
means  of  windows.  Even  closed  windows  with  the  constant 
and  never-failing  use  of  central  or  local  fans,  either  by 
the  recirculation  method  or  that  of  introducing  constantly 
''fresh"  air  from  outside,  have  other  reasons  against  them 
than  those  of  economy.  The  writer  is  very  much  in  favor 
of  wide-spread  and  scientific  experiments  with  recirculation, 
using  the  same  air  over  and  over  again,  with  only  such  re- 
plenishing as  may  come  by  opening  doors,  by  leaks,  and  by 
percolation  through  walls,  coupled  with  a  good  fan  system 
and  supplemented  by  an  effective  air-moistening  and  clean- 
ing chamber.  But  he  would  not  advocate  erecting  buildings 
with  few  side-wall  windows  as  if  fhis  principle  had  been 
scientifically  proved  desirable,  and  its  cost  were  inconsidera- 
ble as  compared  with"  natural  ventilation  at  least  part  of 
the  year.     Both  are  desirable. 

The  saw-tooth  plan  of  overhead  lighting  used  by  Perkins 
seems  to  be  satisfactory  for  Eastern  towns,  but  would  prove 
bad  in  a  Western  cyclone  or  very  high  wind.  His  plan 
of  controlling  the  amount  of  light  from  overhead  by  means 
of  hinged  metal  planes  hanging  from  the  ceiling  under  full 
and  easy  control  by  the  teacher  seems  successful.  A  teacher 
may  cut  off  the  direct  rays  of  the  sun,  let  in  a  small  or  large 
amount  of  light,  or  cut  off  all  light  when  a  stereopticon  or 
other  similar  instrument  necessitating  darkness  is  used. 
This  overhead  system  need  not,  of  course,  cover  the  en- 
tire ceiling.  A  few  large  windows  above  the  pupils  in  the 
rear,  right-hand  corner  will  be  sufficient.  On  a  dark  cloudy 
day  such  supplementary  light  is  a  great  vision  saver.  And 
it  may  here  be  repeated  that  defects  of  vision,  like  cases  of 
tuberculosis,  seem  to  increase,  according  to  Ayres  (but  not 
Kerr),  in  frequency  as  we  go  upward  through  the  grades 


5IO  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

and  years  of  school  life.  In  the  accompanying  plan,  the 
location  of  the  skylight  in  each  room  is  roughly  indicated 
by  a  rectangle  drawn  on  the  floor  plan.  We  have  placed 
the  top-lighting  arrangements  in  a  pitched  roof.  A  flat 
roof  is  usually  very  bad  in  overheating  the  classrooms  in 
hot  weather.  The  space  under  the  pitched  roof  should  be 
kept  open  by  ventilators  in  warm  and  hot  weather. 

Top  lighting  frees  us  also  to  some  extent  from  the  rule 
that  usually  the  classroom  windows  at  the  left  of  the  pupils, 
for  the  sake  of  some  sunlight  each  day,  with  its  cheer  and 
disinfection,  should  face  either  east  or  west.  This  innova- 
tion thus  leaves  us  freer  to  make  the  building  front  toward 
any  point  of  the  compass.  If  we  wish  the  front  where  chil- 
dren are  loaded  and  unloaded  from  transportation  vehicles 
to  be  free  as  possible  from  severe  winds  and  accumulated 
snow,  we  can  have  it  facing  the  south  or  east.  We  have 
placed  it  torward  the  south.  This  has  the  advantage  of 
having  the  heating  plant  on  the  north,  and  helps  in  forcing 
the  air  through  the  ducts  toward  the  south,  a  "well-known 
principle  in  our  latitude.  Orientation,  usually  a  very  im- 
portant and  much-neglected  factor,  is  not  so  great  an  item 
with  this  plan  of  lighting.  For  securing  cheerful  rooms, 
and  for  the  disinfecting  influence  of  sunlight,  it  would  of 
course  be  desirable  to  have  the  two  long  wings  of  class- 
rooms extend  north  and  south,  even  with  overhead  lighting, 
but  this  principle  may  now  with  more  impunity  be  disre- 
garded. We  have  all  classrooms  facing  either  east  or  west. 
The  physics  and  corner  elementary  room,  which  may  be 
used  as  a  kindergarten,  have  also  some  south  light.  These 
rooms  and  others  on  the  front  may  be  top  lighted,  as  may 
all  others. 

If  the  front  of  the  building  embraced  several  classrooms, 
and  the  wings  extended  southward  to  secure  east  and  west 
sunlight  from  the  side  %vindows  each  day,  these  front  class- 
rooms would  have  principally  north  light,  except  for  the 
overhead   lighting.     If   the  front  were  faced   south   these 


THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL        5II 

rooms  would  have  principally  south  lighting,  which  would 
make  it  necessary  to  have  shades  covering  windows  much 
of  each  day,  and  interfering  with  window  ventilation. 
With  dark-green  shades  the  room  would  thus  be  too  dark, 
except  for  the  overhead  lighting.  Translucent  tan  shades 
should  be  used.  Windows  may  be  made  impervious  to 
glare  by  using  proper  glass.  If  the  covered  driveway  is 
extended  along  the  entire  front  as  a  portico,  corridor,  or 
porch,  or  if  there  are  the  driveway  and  right  and  left  porches, 
the  latter  would  act  as  an  awning  to  the  southern  rays  of 
the  sun.  The  south  is  a  better  front  than  the  north  from 
the  standpoint  of  the  transportation  of  pupils  in  winter  in 
the  northern  portions  of  our  country,  but  not  from  the 
standpoint  of  direct  sunlight  much  of  the  time  in  classrooms, 
to  be  avoided  only  by  special  devices  such  as  a  porch, 
awnings  over  windows,  selected  glass  or  glass  coating,  or 
shades  covering  the  windows  much  of  the  time. 

For  the  E  type  of  building,  the  south  exposure  has  a 
disadvantage  in  that  it  places  the  open  end  of  the  courts 
and  corridors  to  the  north.  In  our  northern  States  and 
Canada,  such  a  frontage  would  probably  mean  drifts  of 
snow  filling  the  corridors  part  of  the  year.  Our  plan  shown 
here  has  the  E  form  much  modified  by  the  rear  corridor, 
which  is  partially  closed,  and  would  cut  off  drifts.  If  a 
north  exposure  is  chosen,  the  skylights  of  the  classrooms  on 
this  front  may  be  made  larger  than  those  on  the  side  wings. 
In  the  plan  here  submitted  for  criticism  and  suggestion, 
we  have  placed  the  front  toward  the  north,  eliminated  class- 
rooms here  by  putting  in  offices  and  other  rooms,  and  have 
flanked  much  of  the  front  with  a  covered  driveway  for  the 
protection  of  pupils.  The  room  marked  post-office  may  be 
used  as  a  classroom.  The  possibilities  of  a  building  in  the 
country  with  overhead  lighting  must  be  given  careful 
study,  and  will  only  be  disclosed  after  considerable  such 
investigation  and  the  erection  of  a  number  of  experimental 
buildings  in  different  parts  of  the  country.     Some  means 


512  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

of  collating  and  disseminating  the  results  of  such  experience 
nationally  should  be  devised  by  some  national  committee, 
or  government  bureau.  To  give  the  children  in  the  elemen- 
tary school  (first  six  years)  the  advantage  of  east  light  the 
elementary  and  high-school  wings  should  be  reversed. 

3.  A  more  educationally  elective  classroom  may  by  over- 
head lighting  easily  be  provided  with  advantage  to  the 
entire  school.  The  unilateral-lighting  standard,  seemingly 
so  easily  enforced  on  American  city  schools  of  recent  date, 
and  many  in  the  country,  has  made  as  a  necessary  con- 
comitant a  long,  narrow  classroom  from  front  to  rear. 
Since  light  will  not  penetrate  well  for  reading  beyond  twenty 
feet  on  most  days  of  the  school  year,  rooms  have  been  stand- 
ardized little  wider  than  this,  say  twenty-two  to  twenty- 
four  feet,  the  right-hand  row  of  pupils  sitting  about  three 
feet  from  the  wall.  In  order  to  seat  some  thirty  to  forty- 
eight  pupils,  this  room  must  be  quite  long,  similar  to  store- 
rooms with  narrow  frontage  in  cities.  This  type  of  room 
provides  about  six  long  rows  of  pupils  in  a  room  about 
thirty- two  feet  in  length.  Such  long  rows  of  pupils  are  by 
no  means  as  easy  to  teach  and  manage  as  shorter  rows, 
with  pupils  nearer  to  the  teacher  and  the  front  blackboard, 
on  which  much  of  the  class  work  is  written.  Vision  defects 
among  as  many  frequently  as  one-fifth  of  the  pupils  compli- 
cate the  difficulty.  Large  pupils  must  be  placed  in  the 
rear  or  sides  to  prevent  their  obstructing  the  vision  of  smaller 
children  sitting  behind  them.  The  pupils  in  the  rear  of  the 
room  are  very  commonly  out  of  range  of  the  teacher's  per- 
sonality, which  is  frequently  of  short  range,  especially 
among  the  novices  employed  at  starvation  salaries  in  most 
country  and  village  schools.  Even  the  voice  of  the  aver- 
age woman  teacher  hardly  carries  well  this  distance.  The 
magnetism  of  the  teacher's  presence,  if  she  has  any,  should 
reach  all  pupils,  and  pervade  the  entire  room.  No  pupil 
should  feel  that  he  is  merely  sitting  on  the  bleachers  or  side- 
lines watching  the  real  game  from  afar.     Thus  the  long  room 


THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL  513 

forced  upon  us  by  the  evanescent  god  of  unilateral  lighting 
and  ventilation  has  many  shortcomings. 

Then,  further,  many  schools  have  two  or  more  groups  of 
pupils  in  a  room  who  must  be  taught  separately.  Where 
there  are  mid-year  promotions,  pupils  of  the  same  grade 
are  in  groups  a  half  year  apart  in  advancement.  They  can 
recite  together  in  but  a  few  subjects.  Then,  too,  it  is  very 
common  in  the  ordinary  small  school  to  have  pupils  in  one 
room  of  two  entirely  different  grades,  separated  by  a  full 
year  of  study  from  each  other,  a  fifth  and  sixth  grade,  for 
example,  and  there  may,  in  small  schools,  be  three  grades 
in  a  room,  say  fourth,  fifth,  and  sixth.  Four  principal  ways 
of  having  these  different  groups  recite  without  disturbing 
the  others  in  the  room  have  been  devised.  The  old  front 
recitation-bench  has  about  disappeared  from  graded  schools. 
The  separate  recitation-room,  too,  is  little  used  for  ele- 
mentary children  to-day.  The  plan  of  having  pupils  who 
are  to  recite  take  the  seats  in  the  front  half  of  the  room, 
while  the  occupants  of  these  seats  move  back,  has  too  many 
disadvantages  to  be  seriously  considered,  although  seem- 
ingly used  successfully  by  a  few  teachers  in  graded  schools. 
The  almost  universal  practice  in  good  schools  is  that  of 
having  the  pupils  sit  in  right  and  left  groups,  extending  to 
the  rear  of  the  room. 

But  these  three  long  rows  of  pupils  strung  out  down  a 
long  room  can  scarcely  be  called  groups.  They  are  tenuous 
lines,  too  long  for  an  audience  or  reciting  group  on  either 
side  of  the  room;  the  two  or  more  groups  are  too  close  to- 
gether to  avoid  disturbing  each  other;  and  are  well  arranged 
and  seated  to  destroy  attention  and  interest.  The  room 
is  about  wide  enough  for  one  group  if  it  is  at  the  front  of 
the  room,  as  shown  by  those  teachers  who  have  hit  on  the 
device  of  having  front  and  rear  sections  with  a  movement 
of  all  pupils  between  recitations.  This  disturbance  with  its 
carrying  of  books,  forgetting  of  pencils  and  books,  the 
bothering  of  other  pupils'  property  in  the  desks,  and  other 


514  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

features,  shows  the  trouble  teachers  in  many  such  long  rooms 
are  willing  to  take  to  get  a  compact  reciting  group  near  the 
front  of  the  room. 

The  whole  diificulty  is  easily  solved  by  left-hand,  over- 
head, and  right-hand  lighting,  as  above  described.  The 
limitation  on  the  width  of  the  room  is  immediately  removed, 
and  the  length  may  be  greatly  shortened.  Probably  a 
complete  reversal  of  the  dimensions  and  the  invention  of 
the  wide-short  classroom  is  the  remedy  "we  long  have  sought 
and  mourned  because  we  found  it  not."  A  room  thirty  to 
thirty-two  feet  wide,  and  twenty-four  to  twenty-eight  feet 
from  front  to  rear,  keeping  the  area  about  750  square  feet 
for  forty  pupils,  makes  possible  two  real  groups  of  pupils, 
one  on  the  right  and  one  on  the  left.  With  the  pupils 
brought  forward,  the  teacher  will  no  longer  need  to  "screech," 
one  of  the  common  diseases  of  schools.  Her  pupils  will  be 
near,  even  those  at  extremes  of  right  and  left.  There  is 
more  space  for  large  pupils  in  the  rear;  there  is  a  much 
longer  blackboard  in  front;  there  is  a  much  longer  space  for 
a  cloak-room  in  front  or  rear.  By  placing  the  blackboard 
in  the  rear,  by  the  Perkins  plan,  the  width  of  two  doors 
may  be  added  to  the  front  blackboard.  We  have  thought 
that  the  advantage  of  somewhat  easier  supervision  of  a 
front  blackboard  by  the  teacher  might  offset  the  loss  of 
blackboard  space.  Yet  the  rear  cloak-room,  as  Perkins  has 
devised  it,  may  be  better. 

The  old-style  long  classroom,  with  a  wardrobe  of  six 
to  eight  feet  in  width  on  the  end,  necessitates  a  very  long 
school-building,  depending  upon  the  number  of  rooms. 
With  a  one-story  building  and  a  single  row  of  classrooms  on 
either  of  two  wings,  the  building  may  become,  with  large 
numbers  of  pupils,  interminably  long,  and  thus  almost  as 
inconvenient  as  stairs  and  second  floors  and  basements. 
The  wide-short  classroom  abbreviates  the  building  consid- 
erably, and  thus  obviates  this  disadvantage  of  extreme 
length.     Other  advantages  of  this  new  type  of  classroom, 


THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED  SCHOOL        515 

yet  to  be  constructed,  will  occur  to  all  who  have  had  con- 
siderable experience  in  practical  education. 

4.  Ventilation  will  he  improved  and  heating  will  be 
easier.  The  advantages  of  the  one-story  building  of  this 
character  with  respect  to  ventilation  are  evident.  A  door 
on  either  side  of  the  classroom  means  cross-ventilation,  at 
least  at  the  front  of  the  room  where  the  doors  are  opposite. 
Single-sash  windows  above  the  blackboard  on  the  right 
greatly  increase  cross-ventilation,  and  these  can  remain 
open  much  of  the  times  when  fans  are  not  running,  since 
there  is  no  classroom  of  pupils  across  the  hall  to  disturb,  and 
the  corridor  roof  shelters  from  strong  winds,  direct  sunlight, 
and  rain.  The  vents  in  the  skylight  may  be  opened  at 
will  to  permit  escape  of  heated  air,  and  the  plentiful  windows 
on  the  left,  even  with  a  shorter  room,  let  in  plenty  of  air- 
currents  when  any  are  stirring  outside.  High  windows  on 
the  rear  may  be  put  into  such  rooms  as  open  thus  to  the 
outer  air.  They  may  or  may  not  be  used  in  the  front  cor- 
ner rooms  of  the  accompanying  plan.  They  are  not  essen- 
tial here  and  would  interfere  with  the  symmetry  of  the 
front  of  the  building.  With  movable  seats  the  elementary 
corner  room  may  well  have  long  windows  on  the  north, 
and  the  physics  room  likewise.  The  other  rooms  should  have 
full-length  windows.  Ventilation  by  fans  for  each  room  or 
from  a  central  source  in  the  heating  plant  behind  the  audi- 
torium wing  may  be  as  efficient  as  in  a  two-story  building. 
An  air-washing  room  may  be  connected  with  the  air-heating 
C' coils")  room,  as  shown  in  our  plan.  The  short  classroom 
leaves  less  of  each  room  exposed  to  the  outer  air  to  compli- 
cate ventilation  and  heating.  Other  ventilation  advantages 
may  yet  appear.  A  disadvantage  may  lie  in  the  difficulty 
of  forcing  air  long  distances  horizontally  from  a  central  fan, 
but  the  south  frontage  facilitates  this  movement. 

5.  The  one-story  plan  keeps  the  auditorium  on  the  ground 
level,  and  makes  unnecessary  the  stair-climbing  which  is  a 
disadvantage  from  many  points  of  view,  especially  from  the 
one  of  public  meetings. 


5l6  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

6.  Dismissal  is  easier  for  any  room  or  rooms  without  dis- 
turbance of  other  classes.  In  a  building  containing  both 
elementary  and  high-school  pupils  such  mutual  disturbance 
is  easy.  In  the  one-story  consolidated  building,  the  high 
school,  including  the  seventh  and  eighth  grades,  may  be  in 
one  wing  (west)  and  the  elementary  school  in  the  opposite 
one  beyond  the  auditorium  wing  (east),  and  thus  widely 
separated.  Each  classjroom  of  pupils  can  be  dismissed 
directly  either  into  the  corridor  or  to  the  playground. 
The  auditorium  may  as  suggested  above  have  a  number  of 
exits  into  the  courts  at  either  side.  We  have  located  the 
pupils^  toilets  in  these  courts,  but  the  assembly  platform  is 
ventilated  by  high  windows  above  them.  The  toilets  shown 
herewith  have  full  partitions  in  each,  with  the  doors  for  the 
sexes  far  apart;  and  elementary  and  high-school  toilets  are 
kept  on  their  respective  sides  of  the  building. 

7.  The  cost  is  probably  not  more  than  for  a  two-story  type 
in  spite  of  the  increased  advantages.  Architect  Perkins 
has  made  careful  studies  of  comparative  costs  of  one  and 
two  story  structures,  and  finds  the  difference  usually  in 
favor  of  the  one-story  type,  with  equivalent  facilities.  The 
elimination  of  stairways,  of  thicker  walls  to  support  sec- 
ond stories,  and  of  expensive  fireproofing  materials  in  the 
ceiling  and  roof  bring  down  the  cost.  The  expense  of  adding 
more  rooms  to  the  structure  when  necessary  is  very  much  less 
than  in  case  of  a  two-story  building,  and  the  resulting  ex- 
tensions make  a  harmonious  building  instead  of  a  disfigure- 
ment. All  buildings  are  enormously  expensive  now,  and 
this  complete  building  would  now  cost  upward  of  a  hundred 
thousand  dollars,  although  it  may  be  built  part  by  part  as 
needed. 

8.  This  ease  of  extensions  is  a  point  particularly  in  favor 
of  the  one-story  school.  The  high-school  rooms  are  not  the 
same  size  as  elementary  rooms,  being  usually  smaller. 
Fewer  rooms  at  first  may  be  needed  by  the  high  school. 
But  either  wing  may  be  any  length  without  injury  to  the 


THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL  517 

plan.  The  auditorium  or  gymnasium,  with  perhaps  a  com- 
bined lunch-room  and  library,  may  be  erected  after  the  first 
rooms  if  desired.  We  have  unfortunately  failed  to  in- 
dicate the  swimming-pool  in  this  plan.  The  lunch-room 
space  could  be  used,  or  it  could  extend  back  of  the  rear  cross 
corridor,  and  the  other  rooms  could  be  set  back  to  the 
north  farther.  It  is  not  necessary  or  desirable  to  dig  a 
basement  for  it. 

9.  The  elimination  of  stair-climbing  for  teachers,  pupils, 
and  patrons  should  receive  separate  mention  here,  although 
mentioned  above. 

10.  The  greater  ease  of  management  of  each  classroom 
and  of  the  building  as  a  whole  is  obvious.  Where  pupils 
are  scattered  over  two  or  three  floors  of  a  building  with  the 
toilets  probably  in  the  basement,  the  difficulty  is  great. 
The  principal's  room  to  the  left  of  the  entrance  may  be  made 
a  part  of  the  library,  since  he  has  another  room  across  the 
hall. 

11.  The  greater  ease  of  using  laboratories  and  workrooms 
for  both  elementary  and  high-school  pupils  is  in  favor  of 
the  one-story  type. 

12.  Educationally,  the  rural  building  should  be  as  close 
to  outdoor  life  as  possible.  Here,  in  the  one-story  plan,  the 
entire  school  and  each  classroom  is  close  to  nature,  and  the 
latter  is  very  easy  of  access.  In  a  two-story  building 
teachers  very  infrequently  or  never  come  down  from  the 
second  or  third  floors  to  supervise  and  join  in  the  play  of 
the  children.  Where  the  playground  is  but  a  step  outside, 
hardly  any  person  fit  to  be  a  teacher  can  keep  from  the 
joyous  comradeship  so  helpful  for  both  young  and  old. 
All  teachers  should  go  out  frequently,  as  much  for  the  sake 
of  themselves  as  for  the  children.  Our  building  tempts 
them  into  the  open. 

13.  Such  a  school-building  is  easier  to  build  for  the  ordi- 
nary contractor  obtainable  in  the  country  than  a  two  or 
more  story  structure.     If  concrete  is  used,  and  careful  plans 


5l8  THE  CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

and  perhaps  moulds  are  furnished,  the  specifications  should 
not  be  hard  to  follow.  Brick  also  can  be  used.  Some  school 
boards  will  be  tempted  to  build  a  frame  structure  because 
it  is  cheaper  at  first,  but  this  temptation  should  be  rigidly 
withstood. 

14.  Protected  play  spaces  for  the  little  children  are  pro- 
vided in  the  courts,  or  patios,  on  either  side.  Playground 
supervision  of  all  pupils  is  facilitated. 

15.  Other  advantages  of  the  one-story  type  would 
cover  such  items  as  freedom  from  danger  of  falling  from 
second-story  windows,  ease  of  supervision  of  classrooms 
and  auditorium  by  the  principal,  ease  of  getting  into  the 
machine-shop  with  an  auto  or  tractor  to  be  repaired,  free- 
dom from  carrying  things  up  and  down  stairs,  and  less  danger 
in  case  of  cyclones  in  the  West. 

These,  then,  are  some  of  the  principal  advantages  to  be 
sought  and  gained  by  the  one-story  rural  consolidated  school. 

IV.    Possible  Disadvantages 

Some  of  the  disadvantages  might  be  greater  heat  of 
classrooms  in  summer  than  for  first-floor  rooms  of  two- 
story  buildings  if  a  flat  roof  is  used,  which  we  do  not  ad- 
vocate, somewhat  greater  difiiculty  in  forcing  heat  and  air 
horizontally  instead  of  upward  from  a  basement  as  in  a  two- 
story  building,  greater  distance  of  travel  in  going  about 
through  the  halls,  although  this  is  cut  down  by  shorter  class- 
rooms and  a  cross  corridor  from  wing  to  wing  between  audi- 
torium and  gymnasium,  and  perhaps  by  other  means  to  be 
discovered  by  experience.  That  the  advantages  far  outweigh 
the  disadvantages  seems  to  be  beyond  question,  and  we  have 
no  doubt  that  the  one-story  type  will  be  the  prevalent  one 
for  country  and  village  schools  of  the  future.  A  few  further 
notes  will  conclude  our  examination  of  this  type  of  building. 
More  shower-baths  than  the  three  here  suggested  should 
be  provided.     The  swimming-pool  may  take  the  place  of  the 


THE  NEW  CONSOLIDATED   SCHOOL  519 

machine-shop  and  farm-carpentry  room,  and  these  may  be 
moved  farther  back.  The  showers  could  be  placed  at  one 
end.  The  library  and  post-office  and  community  exchange 
are  in  front,  easy  of  access  to  the  public.  The  teachers' 
rooms  could  be  placed  across  the  rear  corridor  from  the 
pupils'  toilets,  thus  giving  more  space  in  front.  Folding 
gates  may  be  used  to  shut  off  classrooms  for  evening  and 
Sunday  entertainments  in  the  auditorium.  The  connec- 
tions between  elementary  classrooms  may  be  closets  for  the 
teachers.  A  number  of  improvements  and  refinements  will 
be  suggested,  we  hope,  from  time  to  time. 

We  may  confidently  expect  great  developments  of  this 
style  of  building  in  the  next  two  decades.  No  object  is 
better  worth  study,  a  large  use  of  money,  and  careful  experi- 
mentation, than  to  provide  a  rural,  social,  and  educational 
centre,  not  only  for  children  and  youth,  but  of  all  people  of 
a  community.  On  such  centres  the  future  of  rural  life 
largely  depends. 

Wonderful  is  the  spirit  of  cooperation  and  growth, 
The  consolidating  of  interests  and  the  hopes  of  man, 
Ideal  is  the  vision  of  the  new  rural  life, 
But  it  needs  must  secure  a  structure  and  plan. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  ON  CONSOLIDATION  ^ 


1.  Aswell,  Jas.  B.,  State  Supt.  Pub.  Ed.,  Baton  Rouge,  La.— "The 

Consolidation  of  School  Districts,  the  Centralization  of  Rural 
Schools  and  the  Transportation  of  Pupils  at  Public  Expense." 
Circular  of  information,  1906. 

2.  Barrett,  Richard  C. — 'Consolidation  of  Schools  and  Transporta- 

tion of  Children."     Bien.  Rep.  Supt.  Pub.  Ins.  of  Iowa,  1901. 

3.  Bedichek,  Una,  and  Baskett,  Geo.  F. — "The  Consolidation  of 

Rural  Schools  With  and  Without  Transportation."  Bull.  Univ. 
Texas,  No.  96,  1907. 

4.  Biennial  report,  U.  S.  Com.  of  Ed.,  pp.  2581-4.     "Transportation 

of  Pupils  to  School."     1899-1900. 

5.  Carrington,  W.  T.,  State  Supt.  Pub.  Schools,  Missouri— "The 

Rural  School  Problem."     Mo.  School  Rep.,  pp.  4-1 1,  1902. 

6.  "Consolidation  of  Schools  and  Transportation  of  Pupils."     U.  S. 

Com.  of  Ed.  2:2353-2369,  1902. 

7.  Connor,  R.  D.  W. — "Improvement  in  Rural  School  Houses  and 

Grounds."     Pamphlet,  Raleigh,  N.  C,  1900-1906. 

8.  Davenport,    E. — "Consolidation    of    Country    Schools."     Univ. 

111.  Bull.,  1904. 

9.  Fairchild,  E.  T.,  State  Supt.  of  Pub.  Ins.,  Kansas,  Ed.  Com. 

Bull.  No.  I,  1908. 

10.  Fall,  Delos,  Supt.  Pub.  Ins.,  Michigan.     School  Rep.,  pp.  5-34, 

1 901. 

11.  "Consolidation   of   Schools."     Rep.    Supt.   of   Pub.   Ins., 

p.  9,  1902. 

iia.  Foght,  H.  W.— "The  American  Rural  School."     Macmillan  Co. 

12.  Folsom,    Channing — "An   Inquiry   Concerning   the   Conveyance 

of  Scholars  in  New  Hampshire."  51st  N.  H.  School  Rep.,  pp. 
271-292,  1899-1900. 

13.  Fowler,  Wm.  K. — "  The  Consolidation  of  School  Districts:  the  Cen- 

tralization of  Rural  Schools."  Pub.  by  State  of  Neb.  Dept. 
Pub.  Ins.,  1903. 

14.  Gass,  Howard  A. — i6th  Mo.  Rep.  of  Pub.  Schools,  1908-1909. 

*  Prepared  with  help  of  the  Library  Division  of  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education. 

520 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  52 1 

15.  Harvey,  Mrs.  H.   Clay — "School  Problems  in  Adair  County." 

Bull,  ist  District  Normal  School,  Kirksville,  Mo.,  1908. 

16.  Harvey,  L.  D. — "Consolidation  of  School  Districts  and  Trans- 

portation of  Rural  School  Pupils  at  Public  Expense."     Michigan, 
Bull.  No.  7,  1902. 

17.  Jones,  Frank  L. — Ind.  Rep.  Supt.  Pub.  Ins.,  pp.  727-782,  1902. 

18.  Johnson,  W.  H. — Annual  Rep.  of  Jackson  County  Schools,  Inde- 

pendence, Mo.,  1907. 

19.  Jones,  E.  A.,  Stat^  Com.  of  Common  Schools,  Columbus,  O. — 

"The  Centralization  of  Rural  Schools  in  Ohio."     Proceedings 
N.  E.  A.,  1908. 

20.  Joyner,  J.  Y.,  Supt.  Pub.  Ins. — "Consolidation. — Work  to  Be  Done 

and  How  to  Do  It."     N.  C.  School  Rep.,  1902-3  and  1903-4. 

21.  "Consolidation  of  Districts."     Ed.  Bull.  No.  i,  1902. 

22.  Official  letters,  etc.     "Consolidation  of  Districts." 

23.  Kelley,  Patrick  H.,  State  Supt.  Pub.  Ins.,  Michigan — "Consoli- 

dation of  School  Districts  in  Michigan."     Bull.  No.  19,  1906. 

24.  Matson,    Clarence    H. — "Country    Schools. — The    New    Plan." 

Outlook,  p.  981,  Dec,  1902. 

25.  McKenzie,    Hector — "Concrete    Examples    of    Consolidation    of 

Rural  Schools."     N.  D.  Pubsh.  by  Dept.  Pub.  Ins.,  1905. 

26.  Nelson,   Frank,   State  Supt.   Ins.,  Kan. — "The  Consolidation  of 

Rural  Schools."     Kan.  School  Rep.,  p.  38,  1901-2, 

27.  Olsen,  J.  W. — "Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools,  and  Transporta- 

tion of  Pupils  at  Public  Expense."     Bull.  No.  i  Reprint  Bien. 
Rep.  State  Supt.  of  Pub.  Ins.,  Minnesota,  1902. 

28.  Pyne,  R.  A.,  Minister  of  Ed.     Rep.  Minister  of  Ed.,  Toronto,  1910. 

29.  "Report  of  Committee  of  Twelve  on  Rural  Schools."     N.  E.  A., 

1897. 

30.  Rep.  U.  S.  Com.  of  Ed.  2:2353-2369,  1902. 

31.  Riggs,  John  F. — Bien.  Rep.  Supt.  Pub.  Ins.,  Iowa,  1905. 

32.  "Conditions  and  Needs  of  Iowa  Rural  Schools."     Bull. 

by  Supt.  Pub.  Ins.,  1905. 

33.  Southall,  Joseph  W. — "Consolidation  and  Transportation."     Va. 

School  Rep.,  1900-01. 

34.  Stone,  Mason  S.     Cir.  of  Ed.  Information  No.   19,  Dept.  Ed. 

Vt.,  1906. 

35.  Upham,  A.   A. — "Transportation  of  Rural  School  Children  at 

Public  Expense."     Ed.  Rev.  20:241,  1900. 

36.  Ustrud,  H.  A.,  Supt.  Pub.  Ins. — "Consolidation  of  Schools  in 

South  Dakota,  1908." 

37.  Welch,  W.  W.,  Supt.  Pub.  Ins.,  Montana.     Montana  School  Rep., 

pp.  13-20,  1902. 


522  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 


II 

Arkansas,  Education  Commission — "Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools." 
Little  Rock,  Arkansas.  December,  1910.  11  pp.  8°.  (Its  Bul- 
letin no.  3.) 

Bedichek,  Una,  and  Baskett,  G.  T. — "The  Consolidation  of  Rural 
Schools  With  and  Without  Transportation."  2d  ed.  rev.  by  A.  C. 
Ellis.  Austin,  Texas,  University  of  Texas  [1907],  85  pp.,  illus.,  8°. 
(Bulletin  of  the  University  of  Texas,  no.  96.)  Bibliography:  p.  48. 
A  discussion  of  the  situation  in  Texas  and  the  practical  experiences 
with  consolidation  in  other  States. 

Betts,  George  Herbert,  and  Hall,  Otis  E. — "Consolidation  and  Rural 
School  Efficiency."  In  their  "  Better  Rural  Schools."  Indianapolis, 
The  Bobbs-Merrill  Company,  1914.     Pp.  215-325. 

Brogden,  Lautrec  C. — "Consolidation  of  Schools  and  Public  Trans- 
portation of  Pupils."  Raleigh.  Issued  from  office  of  superintendent 
of  public  instruction  of  North  CaroUna,  191 1.  135  pp.,  illus.,  8°. 
(Educational  Bulletin  XVII.) 

Burnham,  Ernest — "Two  Types  of  Rural  Schools,  with  Some  Facts 
Showing  Economic  and  Social  Conditions."  New  York  City,  Teach- 
ers College,  Columbia  University,  191 2.  129  pp.,  8°.  (Teachers 
College,  Columbia  University.    Contributions  to  education,  no.  51.) 

Carney,  Mabel — "Consolidated  Country  Schools."  In  her  "Country 
Life  and  the  Country  School."  Chicago,  Row,  Peterson  &  Company, 
1912.     Pp.  148-187. 

Carrington,  George  D. — "Consolidation  of  Rural  School  Districts. 
Cost  of  Central  High  School.  Free  Transportation  of  Pupils." 
Auburn,  Nebr.,  1908.  16  pp.,  illus.,  8°.  (Nemaha  County,  Super- 
intendent of  Schools.     Bulletin  no.  3.) 

"Consolidation  of  Schools  and  the  Transportation  of  Pupils."  West- 
ern Journal  of  Education,  n.  s.  8:421-501,  June,  1903.  Special  num- 
ber on  this  subject.  Contains  articles  by  Ellwood  P.  Cubberley,  p. 
421;  Superintendent  Kern,  p.  437;  Elmer  E.  Brown,  p.  495;  Hugh 
J.  Baldwin,  p.  496,  etc. 

Cubberley,  Ellwood  P. — "Consolidation  in  Central  Schools."  In  his 
"Rural  Life  and  Education."  Houghton  Mifflin  Company,  pp. 
230-255. 

"Consolidation  of  Schools."    In  "A  Cyclopedia  of  Education." 

Ed.  by  Paul  Monroe,  vol.  II.,  pp.  185-189.     The  Macmillan  Co. 

[Davenport,  E.] — "Consolidation  of  Country  Schools."  2d  ed.  [Urbana, 
111.,  1904],  56  pp.,  8°.  (University  of  Illinois  bulletin,  vol.  II,  no.  3, 
December  i,  1904.) 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  523 

Eaton,  William  L. — "An  Account  of  the  Movement  in  Massachusetts 
to  Close  the  Rural  Schools,  and  to  Transport  Their  Pupils,  at  Public 
Expense,  to  the  Village  Schools."  N.  Sawyer  &  Son,  printers,  1893. 
8  pp.,  8°.  Massachusetts  school  exhibit,  World's  Columbian  Ex- 
position. 

Eggleston,  J.  D.,  and  Bruere,  Robert  W. — "Consolidation  and  Trans- 
portation." In  their  "The  Work  of  the  Rural  School."  Harper  & 
Brothers.     Pp.  173-192. 

Fairchild,  E.  T. — "Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools."  American  Edu- 
cation, 12:121-133,  November,  1908.  Reasons  why  they  should  be 
consolidated. 

Foght,  Harold  W.—"  Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools."  In  his 
"American  Rural  School."     Pp.  302-333.     The  Macmillan  Co. 

Fowler,  William  K. — "Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools."  In  National 
Education  Association.  Journal  of  proceedings  and  addresses, 
1903.  Pp.  919-929.  Bibliography:  pp.  924-929.  Gives  29  argu- 
ments for,  12  against. 

"The  Consolidation  of  School  Districts;   the  Centralization  of 

Rural  Schools;  and  the  Transportation  of  Pupils  at  Public  Expense." 
Lincoln,  Nebr.,  1903.  24  pp.,  8°.  (Nebraska,  Department  of 
Public  Instruction,  1903.) 

Graham,  Albert  B. — "Centralized  Schools  in  Ohio."  Columbus, 
Ohio  State  University,  1909.  24  pp.,  illus.,  8°.  (Ohio.  Agricul- 
tural College.     Extension  bulletin,  vol.  i,  no.  5,  February,  1906.) 

Hanifan,  L.  J. — "Facts  and  Fallacies  About  Consolidation  of  Schools 
in  West  Virginia."  Charleston,  W.  Va.,  Department  of  Free  Schools 
[1914],  16  pp.,  illus.,  8°. 

Hays,  Willet  Martin— "  ConsoHdated  Rural  Schools."  In  American 
Association  of  Farmers*  Institute  Workers.  Proceedings,  1905. 
Washington,  Government  Printing  Office,  1906.  Pp.  53-59.  Bibli- 
ography: 56-59. 

Hugh,  David  D. — "Bulletin  Concerning  Rural  Schools  and  Their 
Consolidation."  Greeley,  State  Normal  School  of  Colorado,  1909. 
$8  pp.,  illus.,  8°.  (Bulletin,  series  IX,  no.  4.)  Bibliography:  pp. 
32-38. 

IlUnois,  Department  of  Public  Instruction. — "The  One-room  and 
Consolidated  Country  Schools  of  Illinois."  4th  ed.,  1914.  120  pp., 
illus.,  8°.     (Circular  no.  76.) 

Indiana,  Department  of  Public  Instruction. — "  Consolidation  of  Rural 
Schools."  In  its  Biennial  report  .  .  .  1911-1912.  Indianapolis, 
W.  B.  Burford,  contractor  for  state  printing  and  binding,  1913.  Pp. 
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Kansas,  Department  of  Public  Instruction.— "BuUetin^of  Information 


524  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RUllAL   SCHOOL 

Regarding  Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools."    Topeka,  Kans.,  1908. 
48  pp.,  illus.,  diagr.,  8°. 

Kentucky,  Department  of  Education. — "Consolidation  and  Trans- 
portation. .  .  ."  Issued  by  Barksdale  Hamlett,  Superintendent  of 
Public  Instruction,  Frankfort.  [Louisville,  Ky.,  The  Bradley  & 
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April,  1913.) 

Kern,  O.  J. — "ConsoHdation."  In  his  "Among  Country  Schools." 
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"  ConsoHdation    of    Rural    Schools."    Education,     26:14-26, 

September,  1905. 

Report  of  a  Visit  to  the  Centralized  Schools  of  Ohio."    Oc- 


tober, 1900.     2d  ed.     Rockford,  111.,  1902.     38  pp.,  illus.,  8°. 

Knorr,  George  W. — "ConsoHdated  Rural  Schools  and  Organization 
of  a  County  System."  Washington,  Government  Printing  Ofhce, 
1910.  99  pp.,  8°.  (United  States  Department  of  Agriculture. 
Office  of  experiment  stations.     Bulletin  232.) 

"A  Study  of  Fifteen  ConsoHdated  Rural  Schools;  Their  Or- 
ganization, Cost,  Efficiency,  and  Affiliated  Interests."  Washington, 
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lication no.  6.) 

Kunkel,  0.  L.,  and  Charters,  W.  W. — "Rural  School  ConsoHdation  in 
Missouri."  Columbia,  Mo.,  University  of  Missouri,  1911.  36  pp., 
illus.,  8°.  (University  of  Missouri  bulletin.  Education  series,  vol. 
I,  no.  2.)     Bibliography:  pp.  35-36. 

Lake  County,  Ind. — "Consolidation  of  Schools."  In  its  educational 
report,  1913.     Pp.  68-81. 

Longsdorf,  H.  H. — "The  Consolidation  of  Country  Schools,  and  the 
Transportation  of  the  Scholars  by  use  of  Vans."  Harrisburg,  Pa., 
Wm.  Stanley  Ray,  State  printer,  1901.  89  pp.,  8°.  (Pennsylvania, 
Department  of  Agriculture.     Bulletin  no.  71.) 

Louisiana,  Department  of  Education. — "The  Consolidation  of  School 
Districts  and  Centralization  of  Rural  Schools  and  the  Transporta- 
tion of  Pupils  at  Public  Expense."  [Baton  Rouge,  1906.]  71  pp., 
illus.,  8°.     "References  for  Information":  pp.  64-71. 

Manitoba,  Department  of  Education. — "Consolidation  of  Rural 
Schools  in  Manitoba."     Special  report.  .  .  .  1913.     43  pp.,  8°. 

Michigan,  Department  of  Public  Instruction. — "Consolidation  of 
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(Bulletin  no.  19,  1906.) 

Mississippi,  Department  of  Education.  Part  I. — "Consolidation  of 
Schools  and  Transportation  of  Pupils."  Part  II. — "County 
Agricultural  High  Schools,  with  Course  of  Study."     Prepared  and 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  525 

issued  by  J.  N.  Powers,  State  Superintendent  of  Public  Education, 

May,  1913.    Jackson,  Miss.,  Jones  Ptg.  Co.  [1913].    68  pp.,  illus., 

8°.     (Its  Bulletin  no.  8,  1913.) 
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to  April,  1914.     Contents:  I.  History  and  Extent  of  the  Movement. 

— II.  Advantages  of  Consolidation. — III.  Transportation  at  Public 

Expense. — IV.  How  Consolidation  Is  Effected. 
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of  Rural  Schools."    E.  C.  Bishop,  State  Superintendent.    Lincoln, 

1910.     39  pp.,  illus.,  8°. 
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Grounds  in  Nebraska."    Lincoln,  1902.     Pp.  228-265. 
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Devils  Lake,  N.  D.,  Journal  Publishing  Co.,  State  Printers,  1913. 

33  pp.,  illus.,  8°. 
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Dakota."     Grand  Forks,  N.  D.,  University  of  North  Dakota,  191 2. 

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526  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

of  Vermont.  6  pp.,  8°.  (Vermont  Department  of  Public  Instruc- 
tion.    Circular  of  information  no.  43.) 

Tennessee,  Department  of  Public  Instruction. — Bulletin  of  information 
regarding  consolidation  of  schools  and  transportation  of  pupils. 
Nashville,  Tenn.,  McQuiddy  Printing  Co.,  191 2.     103  pp.,  8°. 

Texas,  Department  of  Education.— "  Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools." 
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True,  A.  C— "Some  Problems  of  the  Common  Rural  School."  In 
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Upham,  A.  A. — "Transportation  of  Rural  School  Pupils  at  Public 
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Vermont,  Department  of  Education — i.  "Closure  of  Small  Schools." 
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Winnebago  County,  111.,  Superintendent  of  Schools. — "Consolidation 
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Wisconsin,  Department  of  Education. — "Consolidation  of  School 
Districts  and  Transportation  of  Rural  School  Pupils  at  Public  Ex- 
pense." Madison,  Democrat  Printing  Company,  State  Printer, 
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Ill 
A.     CONSOLIDATION  OF  SCHOOLS 

Alderman,  S.  S. — "Consolidation  and  Transportation  in  North  Carolina." 

North  Carolina  Education,  8:3-4,  March,  1914. 
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Book  Co. 
Bailey,  Liberty  Hyde. — "Danger  in  Rural  School  Consolidation."     School 

and  Society,  1:315-316,  February  27,  1915. 
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BIBLIOGRAPHY  527 

Schools  Grow."     In  "Conference  for  Education  in  the  South.     Proceed- 
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Buroker,  A.  B. — "Centralization  of  RuraK Schools."  Journal  of  Educa- 
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Button,  H.  O. — "Is  Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools  Advisable?"  In 
Washington  Educational  Association.     Proceedings,  1912,  pp.  154-160. 

"Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools  in  North  Dakota."  School  and  Society, 
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"Consolidation  of  Schools  in  Utah."  Utah  Educational  Review,  vol.  8, 
nos.  9-10,  May-June,  191 5. 

Cubberley,  Ellwood  P. — "Consolidation  from  the  Standpoint  of  Adminis- 
tration and  Supervision."  In  Utah  Educational  Association.  Pro- 
ceedings, 1915.     Pp.  28^31. 

"Consolidation   In    Central   Schools."     In   his   "Rural   Life   and 

Education."     Boston,  New  York,  Houghton  Mifflin  Company,  1914. 
Pp.  230-255. 

Eggleston,  J.  D.,  and  Bru^re,  Robert  W. — "Consolidation  and  Transporta- 
tion." In  their  "The  Work  of  the  Rural  School."  New  York  and 
London,  Harper  &  Brothers,  1913.     Pp.  173-192. 

Finegan,  Thomas  E. — "The  Township  System  and  the  Consolidation  of 
Rural  Schools."  In  New  York  State  Agricultural  Society.  Proceed- 
ings of  the  75th  annual  meeting,  1915.  Albany,  N.  Y.,  Department  of 
Agriculture  of  the  State  of  New  York,  1915.     Pp.  1 651 -1679. 

Foght. — "The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work."     Macmillan. 

"A  Survey  of  Consolidation."     (Bulletin  of  the  U.  S.  Bureau  of 

Education.) 

Grupe,  M.  A. — "How  the  Problems  of  the  Rural  Schools  Are  Being  Met." 
Popular  Science  Monthly,  83:484-490,  November,  19 13. 

Hall,  Q.  E.—"  Consolidation  of  Districts."  -  In  New  York  (State)  Univer- 
sity. Proceedings  of  the  fiftieth  convocation,  Albany,  19 14.  Albany, 
The  University  of  the  State  of  New  York,  1915.     Pp.  100-116. 

Hoist,  J.  H. — "Victor  Consolidated  Schools."  Intermountain  Educator, 
8:5-7,  January,  1913. 

Describes  the  Victor  consolidated  district  no.  7  of  Victor,  Montana. 

Kentucky,  Department  of  Education. — "Consolidation  and  Transporta- 
tion." Issued  by  Barksdale  Hamlett,  Superintendent  of  Public  In- 
struction, Frankfort.  [Louisville,  Ky.,  The  Bradley  &  Gilbert  Co., 
1913-]  93  PPm  Illus.  (incl.  ports.),  8".  ([Bulletin]  vol.  6,  no.  3,  April, 
1913.) 

Lake  County,  Indiana. — "Consolidation  of  Schools."  In  its  Educational 
Report,  19 1 3.     Pp.  68-81. 

Massachusetts,  Board  of  Education. — Report  of  the  Board  of  Education 
in  Accordance  with  the  Provisions  of  Chapter  70,  Resolves  of  191 1,  in 
the  Matter  of  the  Support  of  Public  Education;  Including  also  Report 
Required  Under  Chapter  39,  Resolves  of  1912,  Relating  to  the  Pay- 
ment of  Transportation  Expenses  of  Pupils  Residing  in  Towns  Not 
Maintaining  High  Schools  and  Attending  High  Schools  in  Other  Towns 


528  THE  CONSOLroATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

or  Cities.     Boston,  Wright  &  Potter  Printing  Company,  State  Printers, 

1912.     74  pp.,  8^ 
At  head  of  title:  The  Commonwealth  of  Massachusetts. 
Mississippi,     Department    of    Education. — Part    L     "Consolidation    of 

Schools  and  Transportation  of  Pupils."     Part  II.     "County  Agricul- 
tural High  Schools,  with  Course  of  Study."     Prepared  and  issued  by 

J.  N.  Powers,  State  Superintendent  of  Public  Education,  May,  1913. 

Jackson,  Miss.,  Jones  Printing  Company  [1913I,  68  pp.,  illus.,  8°.     (Its 

Bulletin  no.  8,  1913.) 
At  head  of  title:  State  Department  of  Public  Education,  Jackson,  Mis- 
sissippi. 
Monahan,  A.  C. — "Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools.     History  and  Extent 

of  the  Movement."     Atlantic  Educational  Journal,  9:169-172,  215-217, 

247-249,  January  to  March,  19 14. 
Moore,  W.  Clement. — "The  Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools."     American 

School  Board  Journal,  46:8,  March,  1913. 
New  Jersey,  Department  of  Public  Instruction. — "Improvement  of  Rural 

Schools  by  Means  of  Consolidation."     Trenton,  1916.     41  pp.,  plates, 

8°. 
Rapeer,  L.  W. — "The  Consolidated  Rural  School  Building."     American 

School  Board  Journal,  Milwaukee. 
"The  One-Story  Rural  Consolidated  School  Building."    Ibid.,  Sep- 
tember, 1919. 
"The  Consolidated  School  Plant."     School  and  Society,  February 

13,  1915. 
"Rural  School  Consolidation  and  National  Consolidation."     Jour- 


nal  of  Educational  Administration  and  Supervision,  June,  19 18. 

"School  Consolidation  in  Tennessee."  School  and  Society,  1:923-924, 
June  26,  1915. 

Schwering,  Benjamin. — "Consolidation  of  Country  Schools."  Progressive 
Teacher,  19:33-35,  April,  1913.  Gives  the  advantages  of  the  consoli- 
dated school,  taking  as  examples  the  John  Swaney  School  of  Putnam 
County,  Illinois,  and  the  Lee's  Creek  School  of  Lee's  Creek,  Ohio. 

Smith,  Melvin  C. — "Advantages  of  Consolidation."  School  News  and 
Practical  Educator,  29:239-240,  January,  1916. 

Tennessee,  Department  of  Public  Instruction. — "Rural  School  Situation 
in  Tennessee;  Bulletin  of  Information  Regarding  Consolidation  of 
Schools  and  Transportation  of  Pupils."  Issued  by  the  Department  of 
Public  Instruction.  Nashville,  Tenn.,  McQuiddy  Printing  Company, 
191 1.     103  pp.,  illus.,  8**. 

Texas,  Department  of  Education. — "Consolidation  of  Rural  Schools." 
Austin,  Texas,  Austin  Printing  Company,  1912.  67  pp.,  illus.,  8"*.  (Its 
Bulletin  no.  15.) 

Warner,  E.  P.— "The  Centralization  of  Rural  Schools."  Ohio  Teacher,  33: 
316-319,  February,  19 13. 

Webb,  J.  C— "Early  Consolidation  in  Indiana."  Journal  of  Education, 
83:318,  March  23,  1916- 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  .  529 

Williams,  S.  H. — "Errol  Consolidated  Rural  School."  Elementary  School 
Journal,  16:358-368,  March,  19 16. 

Winnebago  County,  III.,  Superintendent  of  Schools. — "Consolidation  of 
Schools  in  Country  Life  Education."     In  its  Report,  1912.     Pp.  47-66. 

Winship,  A.  E. — "Consolidation  and  Transportation."  Journal  of  Edu- 
cation, 77:257-258,  March  6,  1913. 

Describes  the  ideal  system  of  transportation  as  used  in  Burley,  Idaho. 

Wisconsin.  Committee  of  Fifteen.-^"  Consolidation  of  School  Districts. 
Report  of  a  Sub-Committee  of  Fifteen  Appointed  by  the  State  Super- 
intendent of  Schools  to  Investigate  Conditions  in  the  Rural  Schools  of 
Wisconsin."  Prepared  by  Pres.  F.  A.  Cotton,  Prof.  M.  V.  O'Shea, 
Inspector  W.  E.  Larson.  Issued  by  C.  P.  Cary,  State  Superintendent. 
Madison,  Democrat  Printing  Company,  State  Printer,  1912.  93  pp., 
illus.,  fold  pi.,  8**.  ([Wisconsin,  Department  of  Education]  Bulletin 
no.  17.) 

"A  reference  list  of  books,  pamphlets,  and  bulletins,  dealing  with  the 
subject  of  consolidation":  pp.  89-90. 

B.     RURAL  SURVEYS 

Bailey,  Liberty  Hyde. — "The  Survey-Idea  in  Country  Life  Work."     19  pp. 
Address  at  Cornell  University,  Ithaca,  N.  Y. 

Bureau  of  Municipal  Research,  New  York. — "Training  School  for  Public 
Service.  Preliminary  Report  on  Conditions  and  Needs  of  Rural  Schools 
in  Wisconsin.  Results  of  Field  Study  Reported  to  the  Wisconsin  State 
Board  of  Public  Affairs  by  the  Training  School  for  Public  Service." 
August,  1912  (New  York  City,  1912),  92  pp.,  8°.  (Efficient  Citizen- 
ship Bulletin,  no.  587.) 

Colorado  State  College  of  Agriculture  and  the  Mechanic  Arts,  Fort  Col- 
lins. Department  of  Rural  and  Industrial  Education. — "The  Rural 
and  Village  Schools  of  Colorado;  an  Eight- Year  Survey  of  Each  School 
District,  1906-1913,  Inclusive,"  by  C.  G.  Sargent,  Colorado  Agricultural 
College,  1914.  106  pp.,  illus.,  diagrs.,  maps.,  8°.  ([Bulletin]  sen  xiv, 
no.  5.) 

Elliff,  Joseph  Dolliver,  and  Jones,  Abner. — "A  Study  of  the  Rural  Schools 
of  Saline  County,  Missouri."  Columbia,  Mo.,  University  of  Missouri, 
1915-  32  pp.,  map.,  8°.  (The  University  of  Missouri  Bulletin,  vol. 
16,  no.  22.     Education  ser.  11.) 

Bibliography  of  school  surveys:  pp.  29-32. 

Felton,  Ralph  A. — "A  Rural  Survey  of Community,  Prepared 

in  Outline."  New  York,  Country  Church  Work,  Board  of  Home 
Missions  of  the  Presbyterian  Church  in  the  U.  S.  A.  [i9i5]»  38  pp., 
97  forms,  8".     Contains  bibliographies. 

Galpin,  C.  J. — "A  Method  of  Making  a  Social  Survey  of  a  Rural  Com- 
munity." II  pp.  (University  of  Wisconsin.  Agricultural  experiment 
station.     Circular  of  information  no.  29,  January,  1912.) 

Georgia,  Department   of   Educatbn. — "Educational  Survey  of   Bulloch 


S30  THE  CONSOLIDATED   RURAL  SCHOOL 

County,  Georgia."     By  M.  L.  Duggan,  Rural  School  Agent.     [Atlanta?], 
1915,  72  pp.,  illus.,  8°. 

-"Educational  Survey  of  Clayton  and  Taliaferro  Counties,  Georgia. 


By  M.  L.  Duggan,  Rural  School  Agent  .  .  .  under  the  direction  of  the 
Department  of  Education.  M.  L.  Brittain,  State  Superintendent  of 
Schools.  [Atlanta?],  1915,  23  pp.,  illus.  (inch  ports.,  plans),  8°.  Num- 
bers 2  and  3  in  a  series  of  educational  surveys  of  the  counties  of  Georgia. 
"Educational  Survey  of  Morgan  County,  Georgia."     By  M.  L. 


Duggan,  Rural  School  Agent.     [Atlanta?],  1915,  77  pp.,  illus.,  8°. 

-"Educational  Survey  of   Rabun   County,   Georgia."     By   M.   L. 


Duggan,  Rural  School  Agent  .  .  .  under  the  direction  of  the  Depart- 
ment of  Education.  M.  L.  Brittain,  State  Superintendent  of  Schools. 
[Atlanta],  1914,  48  pp.,  illus.,  map,  8°.  No.  i  in  a  series  of  educational 
surveys  of  the  counties  of  Georgia. 

[Hill,   Walter   B.] — "Rural   Survey   of   Clarke    County,    Georgia,   with 
Special  Reference  to  the  Negroes."     [Athens,  Ga.,  1915],  63  pp.,  illus., 
maps,  diagrs.,  8**.     (Bulletin  of  the  University  of  Georgia,  vol.  xv,  no.  3.) 
Phelps-Stokes  fellowship  studies,  no.  2. 

Morse,  H.  N.,  Eastman,  E.  Fred,  and  Monahan,  A.  C. — "An  Educational 
Survey  of  a  Suburban  and  Rural  County."  Washington,  Government 
Printing  Office,  1913.  68  pp.,  8°.  (U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education.  Bul- 
letin, 19 13,  no.  32.) 

Survey  of  Montgomery  County,  Md. 

Odell,  Frank  G.,  and  Delzell,  James  E. — "Suggested  Outline  for  a  Rural 
School  Survey."     Nebraska  Teacher,  14:521,  May,  1912. 

Outline  is  divided  into  four  sections,  as  follows:  Physical  Survey, 
Social  Survey,  Educational  Survey,  and  Economic  Survey. 

"Ohio  Rural  Life  Survey." — Ohio  Teacher,  33:49-50,  September,  1912. 

Ohio,  State  School  Survey  Commission. — "Report  to  the  Governor  of 
Ohio  by  the  Ohio  State  School  Survey  Commission.  A  Co-operative 
Field  Study  of  659  Rural  Village  Schools  in  88  Counties,  and  an  Exten- 
sive Study  of  9,000  Schoolrooms  and  of  395  School  Systems,  January, 
1914."  Columbus,  Ohio,  The  F.  J.  Heer  Printing  Company,  1914. 
xxxviii,  352  pp.,  front.,  illus.,  plates,  diagrs.,  8°. 
Oliver  J.  Thatcher,  chairman. 

Presbyterian  Church  in  the  U.  S.  A. — "Board  of  Home  Missions.  De- 
partment of  Church  and  Country  Life.  Ohio  Rural  Life  Survey." 
"Church  Growth  and  Decline  in  Ohio."     [New  York,  1914?],  32  pp.,  8°. 

"Country  Churches  of  Distinction."     [New  York,  1914?],  48  pp., 

illus.,  8^ 

"Northwestern  Ohio."     [New  York,  1914?],  70  pp.,  illus.,  8°. 

"Southeastern Ohio."     [New  York,  1914],  64pp.,  8°. 

"Southwestern  Ohio."     [New  York,  1914?],  93  pp.,  8°. 

-"A  Survey  in  Arkansas,  Illinois,  Indiana,  Kentucky,  Maryland, 


Missouri,  Pennsylvania,  and  Tennessee."     [New  York,  Redfield  Brothers, 
Inc.,  1911-1913],  8v.,  illus.,  8°. 

Rev.  Warren  H.  Wilson,  156  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York  City,  is  super- 
intendent of  this  department  of  Presbyterian  mission  work. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  53 1 

"Rural  School  Survey  In  Nebraska."  Middle  West  School  Review,  8:32, 
December,  191 5. 

St.  John,  G.  B. — "The  Sag  Harbor  Survey."  Report  of  the  Presbyterian 
Church  Home  Missions,  156  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York,  191 1. 

"The  Survey  of  Huntingdon  Presbytery."     Presbyterian  Church, 

Board  of  Home  Missions,  Department  of  Immigration,  1910.     50  pp. 

Thomson,  Edward  H. — "A  Farm- Management  Survey  of  Three  Rep- 
resentative Areas  in  Indiana,  Illinois,  and  Iowa."  [Washington,  Govern- 
ment Printing  Office],  1914,  42  pp.,  incl.  illus.,  map,  tables,  diagrs.,  8°. 

(U.  S.  Dept.  of  Agriculture.     Bulletin  no.  41.) 

Contribution  from  the  Bureau  of  Plant  Industry. 

Wells,  Rev.  George  Frederick. — "Bibliography  on  the  Rural  Social  Survey." 
In  Pennsylvania  Rural  Progress  Association.  Proceedings,  1912.  Pp. 
168-171. 

"A  Social  Survey  for  Rural  Communities."  191 1.  24  pp.  Ad- 
dress the  author,  215  Fourth  Avenue,  New  York,  N.  Y. 

Wilson,  W.  H.— "The  Rural  Life  Survey  for  Church  and  School."  In 
Conference  for  Education  in  the  South.     Proceedings,  1912.    Pp.  87-97. 

"Social  and  Educational  Survey  in  the  Country."     In  Southern 

Educational  Association.     Proceedings,  1912.     Pp.  115-121. 

C.     RURAL   LIFE 

Anderson,  W.  L.— "The  Country  Town."  Garden  City,  N.  Y.:  Double- 
day,  Page  Co.,  1914. 

Bailey,  L.  H. — "The  Country  Life  Movement."  New  York:  Macmillan 
Co.,  191 1. 

"The  Outlook  to  Nature."     New  York:  Macmillan  Co.,  191 1. 

"The  State  and  the  Farmer."     New  York:  Macmillan  Co.,  1908. 

-"The  Training  of  Farmers."     New  York:  The  Century  Co.,  1909. 


"York  State  Rural  Problems,  I."     Albany,  N.  Y.:  J.  B.  Lyon  Co., 

1913. 
"York   State   Rural    Problems,  II."     Albany,  N.  Y.:  J.  B.  Lyon 

Co.,  1915. 
Butterfield,  K.  L. — "Chapters  In  Rural  Progress."     Chicago:  University 

Press,  1908. 
Cabot — "What  Men  Live  By."     New  York:  Houghton  Mifflin  Co.,  1916. 
Crow,  Martha  F. — "The  American  Country  Girl."     New  York:  F.  A. 

Stokes  Co.,  19 1 5. 
Curtis,  H.  S. — "Play  and  Recreation  in  the  Open  Country."     Boston: 

Ginn  &  Co.,  19 14. 
Field,  Jessie — "The  Corn  Lady."     Chicago:  A.  Flanagan  &  Co.,  1915. 
Fiske,  G.  W.— "The  Challenge  of  the  Country."     New  York:  The  Asso- 
ciation Press  Co.,  19 12. 
Holeman,  C.  W.,  and  Murphy,  C.  D. — "Social  Centers  in  the  Southwest." 

Dallas,  Texas:  Texas  Farm  and  Ranch  Pub.  Co.,  1912. 
Hutchinson,  F.  K.— "Our  Country  Life."     Chicago:  A.  C.  McClurg  Co., 

1912. 


532  THE  CONSOLIDATED  RURAL  SCHOOL 

Israel,  H.  (Editor) — "Unifying  Rural  Community  Interests."     New  York: 
Association  Press,  1914. 

McCormick,  W— "The  Boy  and  His  Clubs."     Chicago:  F.  H.  Revel  Co., 
1912. 

Mason,  W.  P. — "Water  Supply."     New  York:  John  Wiley  &  Sons,  19 16, 
4  ed.  rev. 

Needham,  Mary  M. — "Folk  Festivals."     New  York:  B.  W.  Nuebsch,  1912. 

Page,  L.  W.— "  Roads,  Paths  and  Bridges."     New  York:  Sturgis  and  Wal- 
ton Co.,  1912. 

Plunkett,  H.  C— "The  Rural  Life  Problems  of  the  United  States."     New 
York:  The  Macmillan  Co.,  1910. 

Powell,  E.  P.— "How  to  Live  in  the  Country."    St.  Paul,  Minn.:  Webb 
Pub.  Co. 

Robertson,  J.  W. — "  Conservation  of  Life  in  Rural  Districts."     New  York: 
Association  Press,  191 1. 

Sims,  N.  L. — "A  Hoosier  Village."     Longmans,  Green  Co.,  1912. 

Stern,  R.  B. — "Neighborhood  Entertainments."     New  York:  Sturgis  and 
Walton  Co.,  191 1. 

Waugh,  F.  A. — "Rural  Improvement."    New  York:  Orange  Judd  Co., 
1914. 

"Report  of  the  Commission  on  Country  Life."    New  York:  Stur- 
gis and  Walton  Co.,  1912. 

"Balancing  Country  Life."     New  York:  Association  Press,  1917. 

-"Digest  of  the  Federal  Farm  Loan  Act."     U.  S.  Treas.   Dept., 


Federal  Farm  Loan  Board  Circ,  vol.  4,  191 6. 
Wilson,  W.  H. — "The  Evolution  of  a  Country  Community."     Boston: 
Pilgrim  Press,  19 12. 

THE   RURAL   CHURCH 

Ashenhurst,  J.  O.— "The  Day  of  the  Country  Church."     New  York: 

Funk  &  Wagnalls  Co.,  1910. 
Bemies,  C.  O. — "The  Church  in  the  Country  Town."     Chicago:  American 

Baptist  Publishing  Society,  1912. 
Bricker,  G.  A.,  et  al. — "Solving  the  Country  Church  Problem."     Cin- 
cinnati: Jennings  &  Graham,  1913. 
Butterfield,   K.   L.— "The  Country  Church  and  the   Rural   Problem." 

Chicago:  University  Press,  191 1. 
Earp,  E.  L. — "The  Rural  Church  Movement."     New  York:  Methodist 

Book  Concern,  1914. 
Felton,  R.  A. — "Study  of  a  Rural  Parish:  A  Method  of  Survey."     New 

York:  Board  of  Home  Missions  of  Presbyterian  Church,  19 15. 
Gill,  O.  C,  and  Pinchot,  G.— "The  Country  Church."     New  York:  The 

Macmillan  Co.,  1913. 
Mills,  H.  S. — "The  Making  of  a  Country  Parish."     New  York:  Missionary 

Education  Movement,  1914. 
Tipple,  E.  S. — "Some  Famous  Country  Parishes."     New  York:  Eaton  & 

Mains,  191 1. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  533 

Vogt,  P.  L. — "The  Church  and  Country  Life."  New  York:  Missionary 
Education  Movement,  U.  S.  and  Canada,  1916. 

Wilson,  W.  H. — "The  Church  of  the  Open  Country."  New  York:  Mis- 
sionary Education  Movement  of  the  U.  S.,  191 1. 

"Rural  Church  and  Community  Betterment:  The  Country  Church 

and  Rural  Welfare."  New  York:  International  Committee,  Y.  M.  C.  A. 
Press,  19 12. 

Publications  of  the  Association  Press:  "Unifying  the  Rural  Community," 
"The  Country  Church  and  Community  Co-operation,"  "The  Rural 
Church,"  "The  Home  of  the  Countryside,"  "The  Rural  Church  Mes- 
sage." 

RURAL  SOCIOLOGY  AND   ECONOMICS 

Adams,  E.  F. — "The  Modern  Farmer  and  His  Business  Relations."    San 

Francisco:  N.  J.  Stone  Co. 
Anderson,  F.  J. — "The  Farmer  of  To-Morrow."     New  York:  The  Mac- 

millan  Co.,  19 14. 
Bailey,  L.  H. — "The  State  and  the  Farmer."     New  York:  The  Macmillan 

Co.,  1917. 
Benson,  O.  H.,  and  Betts,  G.  H. — "Agriculture  and  the  Farming  Business.'* 

Indianapolis:  The  Bobbs-Merrill  Co.,  191 7. 
Bookwalter,  J.  W. — "Rural  Versus  Urban:  Their  Conflict  and  Its  Causes." 

New  York:  By  the  Author,  191 1. 
Brooks,    T.   J. — "Markets  and    Rural   Economics."     St.    Paul,    Minn.: 

Webb  Pub.  Co. 
Carver,   T.    N. — "Principles  of   Rural   Economics."     St.    Paul,    Minn.: 

Webb  Pub.  Co. 
Carver,  T.   N.   (Compiler) — "Selected  Readings  in   Rural  Economics." 

Boston:  Ginn  &  Co.,  19 16. 
Coulter,  J.  L. — "Co-operation  Among  Farmers."     St.  Paul,  Minn.:  Webb 

Pub.  Co. 
Fairchild,  G.  T.— "Rural  Wealth  and  Welfare."     New  York:  Macmillan 

Co.,  1909.     2d  ed. 
Gillette,    J.    M. — "Constructive    Rural    Sociology."     St.    Paul,    Minn.: 

Webb  Pub.  Co.,  1912. 
Green,  J.  B. — "Law  for  the  American  Farmers."     New  York:  The  Mac- 
millan Co.,  191 1. 
Herrick,  M.  T.,  and  Ingalls — "  Rural  Credits."     New  York:  D.  Appleton 

&  Co.,  1914. 
Hunt,  T.  F. — "  How  to  Choose  a  Farm."     New  York:  The  Macmillan  Co., 

1906. 
Morman,  J.  B. — "The  Principles  of  Rural  Credits:  As  Applied  in  Europe 

and  as  Suggested  for  America."     New  York:  The  Macmillan  Co.,  1915. 
Myrick,  H. — "Agriculture  and  Preparedness."     New  York:  Orange  Judd 

Co.,  1917. 

"Co-operative  Finance."     New  York:  Orange  Judd  Co, 

"How  to  Co-operate."     New  York:  Orange  Judd  Co. 


534  THE  CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

Myrick,  H. — "The  Federal  Farm  Loan  System."     New  York:  Orange 

Judd  Co.,  1917. 
Nourse,  E.  G. — "Agricultural  Economics."     Chicago:  University  Press, 

1916. 
Phelan,  J. — "Rural  Economics  and  Rural  Sociology."     Eau  Claire,  Wis.: 

Eau  Claire  Book  Co.,  1913. 
Foe,  C. — "How  Farmers  Co-operate  and  Double  Profits."     New  York: 

Orange  Judd  Co.,  1915. 
Powell,  G.  H. — "Co-operation  in  Agriculture."     New  York:  The  Macmil- 

lan  Co.,  1914. 
Taylor,  H.  C. — "An  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Agricultural  Economics." 

New  York:  The  Macmillan  Co.,  191 5. 
Vogt,  P.  L. — "  Introduction  to  Rural  Sociology."     New  York:  D.  Appleton 

&  Co.,  1917. 
Weld,  L.  D.  H.— "The  Marketing  of  Farm  Products."     New  York:  The 

Macmillan  Co.,  191 7. 
Wiley,  H.  W.— "The  Lure  of  the  Land— Farming  After  Fifty."     New 

York:  The  Century  Co.,  19 15. 

SANITATION  AND   HYGIENE 

Brewer,  I.  J.— "Rural  Hygiene."     St.  Paul,  Minn.:  Webb  Pub.  Co.,  1913. 
Bushore,  H.  B. — "Sanitation  of  the  Country  House."     St.  Paul,  Minn,: 

Webb  Pub.  Co.,  1905. 
Dodd,  Mrs.  Helen — "The  Healthful  Farm  House."     Boston:  Whitcomb 

&  Barrows,  1906. 
Harris,  H.  F.— "  Health  on  the  Farm."     New  York:  Sturgis  &  Walton  Co., 

1911. 
Hutchinson,  Woods — "Exercise  and  Health."     St.  Paul,   Minn.:  Webb 

Pub.  Co.,  1915. 
Lipman,   J.   G. — "Bacteria   in    Relation    to   Country    Life."     Chicago: 

Breeder's  Gazette,  1908. 
Ogden,  H.  N. — "Rural  Hygiene."     Chicago:  Breeder's  Gazette,  191 1. 
Santee,  Dr. — "Farm  Sewage."     St.  Paul,  Minn.:  Webb  Pub.  Co.,  1915. 
"The  American  Red  Cross."     Rural  Nursing  Service,  Washington, 

D.  C. 

D.    AGRICULTURAL  EDUCATION 

Bricker,   G.   A. — "Agricultural   Education   for  Teachers."     New   York: 

American  Book  Co.,  1914. 
"The  Teaching  of  Agriculture  in  the  High  School."     New  York: 

The  Macmillan  Co.,  191 1. 
Cromwell,  A.  D. — "Agriculture  and  Life."     Philadelphia:  J.  B.  Lippin- 

cott  Co.,  191 5. 
Davenport,  E. — "Education  for  Efficiency."     New  York:  D.  C.  Heath 

&  Co.,  1914. 
Davis,  B.  M. — "Agricultural  Education  in  the  Public  Schools."     Chicago: 

University  of  Chicago  Press,  19 12. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  535 

Eaton,  T.  H. — "Organization  and  Methods  in  Agriculture  in  Secondary 

Schools."     New  York:  Teachers  College,  Columbia  University,  191 7. 
Hart,  J.  K. — "Educational  Resources  of  Village  and  Rural  Communities." 

New  York:  The  Macmlllan  Co.,  19 14. 
Hummel,  W.  B.  and  B.   R. — "Materials  and  Methods  in  High  School 

Agriculture."     New  York:  The  Macmlllan  Co.,  191 3. 
Leake,  A.  H. — "  Means  and  Methods  of  Agricultural  Education."     Boston : 

Houghton  Mififlln  Co.,  1915. 
Nolan,    A.    W. — "The   Teaching   of   Agriculture."     Boston:    Houghton 

Mifflin  Co.,  1918. 
Thompson,  F.  E.,  et  al. — "Teachers*  Manual  of  Educational  Agriculture." 

Boston:  GInn  &  Co.,  1908. 
Waugh,  F.  A.— "The  Agricultural  College."     New  York:  Orange  Judd 

Co.,  1916. 

RURAL  SCHOOLS 

Alderman,  L.  R. — "School  Credit  for  Home  Work."     Boston:  Houghton 

Mifflin  Co.,  1915. 
Arp,  J.  B. — "Rural  Education  and  the  Consolidated  School."     Yonkers- 

on-the-Hudson:  World  Book  Co.,  191 8. 
Barry — "The  Hygiene  of  the  Schoolroom."    New  York:  Silver,  Burdett  Co. 
Betts,  G.  H.,  and  Hall,  O.  E. — "Better  Rural  Schools."     Indianapolis, 

Ind.:  Bobbs-Merrill  Co.,  1914. 
Betts,  G.  H.— "New  Ideas  in  Rural  Schools."    Houghton  Mifflin  Co., 

1913. 
Burk,  F.  W.— "  Health  and  the  School."     St.  Paul,  Minn. :  Webb  Pub.  Co. 
Burnham,  E. — "Two  Types  of  Rural  Schools."     New  York:  Teachers 

College,  Columbia  University,  19 12. 
Carney,    Mabel — "Country   Life  and   the   Country  School."     Chicago: 

Row,  Peterson  &  Co.,  19 12. 
Challman,  S.  A.— "The  Rural  School  Plant."     Milwaukee:  Bruce  Pub. 

Co.,  1918. 
Cubberley,    E.    P. — "Rural   Life   and   Education."     Boston:   Houghton 

Mifflin  Co.,  1914. 
"The  Improvement  of  Rural  Schools."     Boston:  Houghton  Mifflin 

Co.,  1912. 
Culter,  H.  M.,  and  Stone,  Julia  M.— "The  Rural  School:  Its  Methods  and 

Management."     New  York:  Silver,  Burdett  Co.,  1913. 
Curtis,  H.  S. — "Education  Through  Play."     New  York:  Macmlllan  Co., 

1915. 
"Play  and  Recreation  for  the  Open  Country."     Boston:  Ginn  & 

Co.,  1914. 
Dinsmore,  J.  W. — "Teaching  a  District  School."    Cincinnati:  American 

Book  Co.,  1913. 
Dressier,  F.  B.— "School  Hygiene."    St.  Paul,  Minn.:  Webb  Pub.  Co. 
Eggleston,  J.  D.,  and  Bruere,  R.  W.— "The  Work  of  the  Rural  School." 

New  York:  Harper  &  Bros.,  19 13. 


536  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

Foght,  H.  W.— "The  American  Rural  School."  New  York:  Macmillan 
Co.,  1910. 

"The  Rural  Teacher  and  His  Work."  New  York:  The  Macmil- 
lan Co.,  1918. 

Hart,  J.  K. — "Educational  Resources  of  Village  and  Rural  Communities." 
New  York:  The  Macmillan  Co.,  191 6. 

Kennedy,  Jos. — "Rural  Life  and  the  Rural  School."  Cincinnati:  Ameri- 
can Book  Co.,  19 1 5. 

Kern,  O.  J. — "Among  Country  Schools."     Boston:  Ginn  &  Co.,  1916. 

McKeever,  W.  A. — "Farm  Boys  and  Girls."  New  York:  The  Macmil- 
lan Co.,  1912. 

Pickford,  A.  F.— "Rural  Education."    St.  Paul,  Minn.:  Webb  Pub.  Co., 

1915. 
Quick,  Herbert — "The  Brown  Mouse."     Indianapolis:  Bobbs-Merrill  Co., 

1916. 
Robbins,  C.  L. — "The  School  as  a  Social  Institution:  An  Introduction  to 

the  Study  of  Social  Education."     Boston:  Allyn  &  Bacon,  1918. 
Seeley,  H.  H. — "The  Country  School."     New  York:  Charles  Scribner's 

Sons,  1913. 
Wilkinson — "Rural  School  Management."     New  York:  Silver,  Burdett 

Co.,  1916. 

IV 

WHERE  YOUR  COMMUNITY  CAN  GET  HELP 

The  communities  in  your  state  have  a  number  of  agencies  which  they 
may  call  upon  for  advice.  Some  of  these  are  state-aided  organizations, 
boards,  and  institutions  which  send  their  representatives  upon  request 
and  entirely  without  charge.  It  is  their  purpose  to  serve  the  entire  state. 
They  should  be  consulted  freely.  Assistance  should  also  be  sought  from 
publications  of  various  sorts,  many  of  which  may  be  had  on  request. 

Before  advice  is  sought  from  state  and  county  agencies  there  should  be 
a  definite  local  group  which  will  give  responsibility  to  the  request  and  a 
reasonable  probability  that  the  advice  will  be  acted  upon.  Some  of  the 
agencies  and  publications  are  as  follows: 

A.    Community  Organization 
Agencies 

The  Farm  Bureau  of  your  county. 

The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service. 

The  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture,  Washington. 

The  Federal  Board  for  Vocational  Education. 

Books 

"Chapters  in  Rural  Progress" — K.  L,  Butterfield — University  of  Chicago 
Press,  Chicago. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  537 

"The  Country  Town"— W.  L.  Anderson— Baker  &  Taylor  Co.,  New  York. 

"The  Social  Center"— E.  J.  Ward— Appleton  &  Co.,  New  York. 

"Community  Rebuilding,  How  Can  It  Be  Done" — E.  L.  Morgan — En- 
cyclopedia Our  Wonder  World,  Volume  lo — Geo.  L.  Sherman  &  Co., 
Boston. 

"The  Evolution  of  the  Country  Community" — Warren  H.  Wilson — Pil- 
grim Press,  Boston. 

"Constructive  Rural  Sociology" — John  M.  Gillette — Sturgis  &  Walton, 
New  York. 

"Introduction  to  Rural  Sociology" — Paul  L.  Vogt — Appleton  &  Co.,  New 
York. 

B.    Farm  Production 

Agencies 

The  Farm  Bureau  or  Farm  Agent  of  your  county. 
The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service. 
The  State  Board  of  Agriculture,  State  House,  Boston. 
The  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture,  Washington. 

Books 

"Fertilizers  and  Crops" — L.  L.  Van  Slyke — Orange  Judd  Co.,  New  York. 

"Productive  Farm  Crops" — E.  G.Montgomery — J.  B.  Lippincott,  Phila- 
delphia. 

"Principles  of  Fruit  Growing" — L.  H.  Bailey — Macmillan  Company,  New 
York. 

"Dairy  Farming" — C.  H.  Eckles — Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 

"Feeds  and  Feeding" — Henry  and  Morrison — Madison,  Wisconsin, 

"Farm  Management" — G.  F.  Warren — Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 

"Equipment  for  the  Farm  and  Farmstead" — H.  C.  Ramsower — Ginn  & 
Company,  New  York. 

"Productive  Poultry  Husbandry" — H.  R.  Lewis — ^J.  B.  Lippincott,  Phila- 
delphia. 

C.    Farm  Business 

Agencies 

The  Farm  Bureau  of  your  county. 
The  marketing  agent  of  your  district. 
The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service. 
The  State  Board  of  Agriculture. 
The  Chamber  of  Commerce  of  leading  cities. 

The  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture,  Bureau  of  Markets,  148 
State  Street,  Boston. 

Books 

"Marketing  Farm  Products" — L.   D.  H.  Weld — Macmillan  Company, 

New  York. 
"  Principles  of  Rural  Economics" — T,  N,  Carver — Ginn  &  Co.,  New  York, 


538  THE   CONSOLIDATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

"An   Introduction   to   the   Study   of  Agricultural   Economics" — H.    C. 

Taylor — Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 
"Co-operation  in  Agriculture" — G.  Harold  Powell — Macmillan  Co.,  New 

York. 
"Co-operative  Marketing" — W.  W.  Cumberland — Princeton  University 

Press. 
"Rural  Credits" — J.  B.  Norman — Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 

D.    Conservation 
AgeTtcies 

The  Farm  Bureau  of  your  county. 

The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service. 

The  Local  or  National  Board  of  Food  Administration. 

The  National  Civic  Federation,   New  England  Section,  20  Ashburton 

Place,  Boston, 
The  Special  Aid  Society  for  American  Preparedness,  142  Berkley  Street, 

Boston. 
The  Federation  of  Women's  Clubs. 
The  State  Forestry  Association. 

Books 

"The  Conservation  of  Natural  Resources  in  the  United  States" — Charles 

R.  Van  Hise — Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 
"Everyday  Food  in  War  Time" — Mary  S.  Rose — Macmillan  Company, 

New  York. 
"Nature  and  Man  in  America" — N.  S.  Shaler — C.  Scribner's,  New  York. 
"The   Landscape   Beautiful" — F.   A.   Waugh — Orange  Judd   Company, 

New  York. 

E.    Boys'  and  Girls'  Activities 
Agencies 

The  Farm  Bureau  of  your  county. 

The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service. 

The  State  Board  of  Education,  State  Capital. 

The  State  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  Rural  Work  Department. 

The  State  Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Cruelty  to  Children. 

The  Boy  Scouts  of  America,  200  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York. 

The  Camp  Fire  Girls,  118  East  28th  Street,  New  York. 

The  Girl  Scouts,  i  Madison  Avenue,  New  York. 

Books 

"Elementary    Agriculture" — James    S.    Grimm — Allyn    &    Bacon,    172 

Tremont  Street,  Boston. 
"Handicaps  of    Childhood" — Haddington  Bruce-;-Dodd   Mead  &    Co., 

New  York. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  539 

"Reaching  the  Boys  of  an  Entire  Community" — Y.  M.  C.  A.  Press,  New 

York. 
"Farm   Boys  and   Girls" — Wm.   A.    McKeever — Macmillan   Company, 

New  York. 
"The  Boy  Scouts  of  America"  (manual) — 200  Fifth  Avenue,  New  York. 
"The  Camp  Fire  Girls"  (manual)— 118  East  28th  Street,  New  York. 
"The  Girl  Scouts  of  America"  (manual) — i  Madison  Avenue,  New  York. 

F.    Community  Life 

I.      HOME  AFFAIRS 

Agencies 
The  Farm  Bureau  Home  Demonstration  Agent  of  your  county. 
The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service. 
State  Branch,  National  Civic  Federation. 

The  State  Federation  of  Women's  Clubs,  Home  Economics  Section. 
The  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture,  Division  of  Publications, 

Washington. 
The  U.  S.  Bureau  of  Education. 
The  Children's  Bureau,  Department  of  Labor,  Washington. 

Books 

"Feeding  the  Family" — Mary  S.  Rose — Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 

"Care  and  Feeding  of  Children" — Dr.  L.  E.  Holt — D.  Appleton  &  Com- 
pany, New  York. 

"Training  the  Boy" — Wm.  A.  McKeever — Macmillan  Company,  New 
York. 

"Training  the  Girl" — ^Wm.  A.  McKeever — Macmillan  Company,  New 
York. 

"Cost  of  Living  Series" — Ellen  H.  Richards — J.  Wiley  &  Sons,  New  York. 

"The  Care  of  the  House" — T.  M.  Clark — Macmillan  Company,  New 
York. 

"How  to  Live" — Fisher  &  Fisk — Funk  &  Wagnalls  Company,  New  York. 

"One  Woman's  Work  for  Farm  Women" — Jennie  Buell — Whitcomb  & 
Barrows,  Boston. 

"  Home  Hygiene  and  the  Prevention  of  Disease  " — Dutton  (Duffield  &  Co.). 

2.      EDUCATION 

Agencies 
The  State  Board  of  Education,  State  Capital. 
The  Farm  Bureau  of  your  county. 

The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service.    The  State  University. 
The  State  Grange. 

The  Free  Public  Library  Commission,  if  any. 
Parent-Teacher  Association. 
The  State  Federation  for  Rural  Progress,  if  any. 
The  United  States  Bureau  of  Education,  Washington,  D.  C. 


540  THE   CONSOLIDATED  RURAL   SCHOOL 

Books 

"Among  Country  Schools" — O.  J.  Kern — Ginn  &  Co.,  New  York. 

**The  Redirection  of  the  Rural  School" — L.  H.  Bailey — Macmillan  Com- 
pany, New  York. 

"Country  Life  and  the  Country  School" — Mabel  Carney — Row,  Peterson 
&  Company,  Chicago. 

"  Practical  School  and  Home  Gardens" — G.  W.  Wood — ^Long  &  Company, 
Lincoln,  Nebraska. 

"Educational  Resources  of  Village  and  Rural  Communities" — W.  R. 
Hart — Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 

"The  Village  Library" — Mary  A.  Tarbell — Massachusetts  Civic  League, 
Boston. 

3.      PUBLIC  HEALTH 

Agencies 

The  State  Department  of  Health,  State  Capital. 

The  Health  Officer  in  your  district. 

The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service.    The  State  University. 

The  State  Anti-Tuberculosis  League,  if  any. 

Books 

"The  Sanitation  of  a  Country  House"— H.  B.  Bashore— J.  Wiley  & 
Sons,  New  York. 

"Principles  of  Sanitary  Science  and  the  Public  Health" — W.  Y.  Sedgwick 
— Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 

"A  Manual  for  Health  Officers"— J.  S.  MacNutt— J.  Wiley  &  Sons,  New 
York. 

"A  Manual  of  Personal  Hygiene"— W.  L.  Pyle— W.  B.  Saunders  Co., 
Philadelphia. 

"General  Bacteriology" — Edwin  O.  Gordan — W.  B.  Saunders  Co.,  Phila- 
delphia. 

4.      TRANSPORTATION  AND  COMMUNICATION 

Agencies 

The  State  Highway  Commission. 

The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service.     The  State  University. 
The  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture,  Division  of  Publications, 
Washington. 

Books 

"Roads,  Paths,  and  Bridges"— L.  W.  Page— Sturgis  &  Walton  Co.,  New 

York. 
"Construction  and  Care  of  Earth  Roads" — Ira  O.  Baker — University  of 

Illinois,  Urbana. 
"Railroad    and    Street    Transportation" — R.    D.    Fleming — Cleveland 

Foundation,  Cleveland,  Ohio. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  54I 

5.      RECREATION 

Agencies 
The  Farm  Bureau  of  your  county. 

The  County  Young  Men's  Christian  Association  secretary  of  your  county. 
The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service. 
The  State  Civic  League,  if  any. 

The  Playground  Association  of  America,  i  Madison  Avenue,  New  York. 
The  Department  of  Recreation,  Russell  Sage  Foundation,  103  East  22d 

Street,  New  York. 

Books 
"The  Unused  Recreation  Resources  of  the  Average  Community" — C.  A. 

Perry — Russell  Sage  Foundation,  New  York. 
"Play  and  Recreation  for  the  Open  Country" — H.  S.  Curtis — Ginn  & 

Co.,  New  York. 
"Neighborhood  Entertainments" — R.  B.  Stern — Sturgis  &  Walton  Co., 

New  York. 
"The    Home    Playground" — Joseph    Lee — Playground    Association    of 

America,  i  Madison  Avenue,  New  York. 

6.      CIVIC  AFFAIRS 

Agencies 
The  State  Civic  League  or  other  similar  organization. 
The  State  Agricultural  College,  Extension  Service. 

Books 
"Rural   Improvement" — F.  A.  Waugh — Orange  Judd  Company,   New 

York. 
"Town  Planning  for  Small  Communities" — C.  S.  Bird,  Jr.,  Appleton  & 

Co.,  New  York. 
"Community  Civics" — Field  and  Nearing — Macmillan  Company,  New 

York. 
"The  Farmstead" — L  P.  Roberts — Macmillan  Company,  New  York. 

7.      PUBLIC  MORALITY 

Agencies 
The  State  secretaries  or  resident  bishops  of  the  various  denominations. 
The  State  Federation  of  Churches. 
The  State  Young  Men's  Christian  Association. 
The  National  Committee  of  the  Young  Women's  Christian  Association, 

600  Lexington  Avenue,  New  York. 
The  State  Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Cruelty  to  Children. 

Books 
"The  Priest  and  Social  Action" — Charles  Plater — Longmans,  Green  & 

Co.,  New  York. 
"Problems  of  the  Town  Church"— G.  A.   Miller— Fleming  H.   Revell 

Company,  Chicago. 


542  THE   CONSOLroATED   RURAL   SCHOOL 

"Institutional  Work  for  the  Country  Church" — C.  E.  Hayward — Burling- 
ton Free  Press  Association,  Burlington,  Vermont. 

"The  Country  Church" — Gill  &  Pinchot — Macmillan  Company,  New 
York. 

"The  Church  of  the  Open  Country" — Warren  H.  Wilson — Missionary 
Education  Movement,  New  York. 

"Using  the  Resources  of  the  Country  Church" — E.  R.  Groves — Associa- 
tion Press,  New  York. 

"The  Country  Church  and  the  Rural  Problem"— K.  L.  Butterfield— 
University  of  Chicago  Press,  Chicago. 

"Vital  Problems  in  Rural  Leadership" — W.  J.  Campbell — International 
Y.  M.  C.  A.  College,  Springfield,  Mass. 


INDEX 


Acquaintance  group,  8 

Administration  of  schools,  25 

Advantages  of  consolidation,  8,  14,  46 

Agricultural  education,  308 

Aims  of  education,  287,  300,  346,  369 

Algebra,  327 

Appreciation,  406 

Architects,  school,  167 

Area  of  consolidation,  8 

Arguments  for   traditional   subjects, 

328 
Aristocratic  aims,  340 
Assembly,  306;  room,  183 
Attendance,  24 
Attention,  398 
Auditorium,  457,  5 iS 
Automobile,  213 
Avocation,  430 
Avocational  efficiency,  295,  311,  444; 

training,  356 

Bagley,  on  instincts,  379 
Bailey,  L.  H.,  478 
Bemtz,  246 
Blair,  F.  H.,  483 
Boarding  place,  196 
Buildings,  184,  500,  507 


Composition,  311 

Consolidation  of  school,  definition,  7; 

advantages,  280;  city  schools,  168; 

facts,  241 
Contracts  with  drivers,  220 
Cook,  County  Superintendent,  7 
Co-operation,  278 
Co-operative  credit  unions,  52. 
Costs,  258,  274;    consolidation,  251; 

transportation,  218,  487 
Cottage,  439;   plans,  193;   teacher's, 

190 
County,   orgam'zation,   34;    minded- 

ness,  64 
Curriculum,  247,  284,  301,  320,  500 

Democracy,  354 

Determinants  of  the  public  school,  16 

Dewey,  on  method,  401 

Domestic  science,  242 

Differences,  individual,  372 

Difficulties  of  consolidation,  475 

Disadvantages  of  consolidation,   15, 

475 
Discipline,  396,  406;  formal,  381,  384 
Drill  lesson,  417 
Drivers,  501 


Camp  Fire  Girls,  441 

Centralization,  2 

Chautauqua,  53 

Church,  276 

Class,  periods,  306;  work,  247;  stan- 
dards, 178 

Classroom,  572 

Claxton,  5 

College  entrance,  317 

Community  centres,  270;  organiza- 
tion plan,  464;  meetings,  244,  254; 
ways,  61 


Economic  forces,  52;    independence, 

434;  rural,  29 
Electives,  337 
English,  310,  337,  339;    aims,  344; 

requirements,  324 
European  ideals,  330 
Examination,  407 
Exhibits,  school,  242 
Expense.     See  Costs 
Expression,  361 
Exploiters  of  land,  56 
Extensions,  516 


543 


544 


INDEX 


Facts  of  consolidation,  246 

Farm  home,  197 

Freeman  on  psychology  of  common 

branches,  388 
Finigan,  Dr.  Thos.  E. 

Gary  school,  183;  system,  170 
Geography,  312 

Girl,  the  county,  425;  scouts,  441 
Gossip,  200 

Habits,  383,  417 

Handicrafts,  459;    health,  245,   292, 

322,  367,  429 
Heating,  176,  273 
High  school,  170,  243,  249,  256;  rural, 

36 
History,  310 
Holly  school,  179 

Home,  education,  308;  making,  435 
Homes,  school,  190 
Horn  ^steading,  55 

Household  organization,  54;  tusks,  432 
Hygiene,  307 
Hypotheses,  412 

Inheritance,  375 
Immigrant  demands,  331 
Improving  rural  schools,  45 
Instincts,  375 
Instruction,  293,  406 
Integration,  59 
Interest,  248 

Junior  high  school,  304 

Knowledge,  386 

Latin,  327 

Leadership,  9,  491 

Lesson  steps,  409 

Letter  writing,  311 

Library,  169,  176 

Life  situations,  398 

Lighting,  173;  overhead,  171,  508 

Management,  class,  395 
Manual  training,  242 


Market,  the  world,  52 

Methods,  293;  general,  400 

Migrant  farmer,  55 

Morals,  246;  efficiency,  299,  311,  358 

Motion  pictures,  461 

Motivation,  387,  397 

Music,  296 

Non-arithmetical  matterates,  327 
Non-English  languages,  327 

Ohio  school  awakening,  224 
One-room  school,  493 
One-story  building,  506 
Orientation  of  building,  173 

Parker,  on  types  of  learning,  387 
Perkins's  building  plans,  179,  186 
Pioneer  life,  449 

Preble  County,  campaign,  239;    con- 
solidation, 233 
Prevention  and  cure,  368 
Principal  of  school,  9 
Principles  of  rural  education,  17 
Problem,  The,  411;  method,  416 
Program  of  studies,  12,  303,  314 
Privies,  182 

Professional  preparation,  295 
Pupils  in  rural  schools,  23 
Puritans,  448 

Randolph  County,  263 

Reasoning,  410 

Recitation,  407,  420 

Recreation,  295,  311,  430,  397,  444, 

455 

Refutation  of  arguments  for  tradi- 
tional subjects,  329 

Roads,  bad,  485 

Route,  transportation,  209,  225,  229 

Rural  education,  principles,  17;  prob- 
lems, 6 

Rural  school  needs,  31 

Salary  of  teachers,  195 
Sargent  school,  276 
Schedules  of  transportation,  232 
School  site,  161 


INDEX 


545 


Science,  312 

Seating,  180 

Secretaries'  recreation,  460 

Self-activity,  381 

Shades,  window,  175 

Site,  of  school,  161,  499 

Six-six  plan,  304;  program,  304 

Social  activities,  440 

Social  centre,  12,  47,  57,  202 

Social  meetings,  253 

Solitary  framing,  54 

Solutions  of  rural  education  problems, 

6 
Spelling,  309 
Stair  climbing,  517 

Standards  of  consolidation  school,  172 
State  administration,  36 
Steps  in  lesson,  409 
Studies,  12,  29,  37,  247,  284,  320 
Subject  matter,  37,  321 
Subjects  of  study,  320 
Supervision,  403 
Surveys  of  recreation,  452 
Surveys,  rural,  38;  rural  schools,  28 

Taxes,  school,  33 
Teachers,  9,  28,  41,  504 
Teacherage,  190 


Teaching  process,  392 

Teaching,  principles  of,  396 

Tenure  of  land,  56 

Terms  of  school,  24 

Testing  suggestions,  415 

Thinking,  410 

Thomdike,  on  achievement,  371 

Time  on  routes,  234 

Toilet  rooms,  181 

Transportation,  208;   success  of,  216, 

258,  260,  269 
Types  of  teaching,  405 

Unit  of  support  and  control,  32 

Values,  relative,  345 
Ventilation,  176,  273 
Vernon's  building  plan,  187 
Vincent,  Dr.  Geo.  E.,  204 
Vital  efficiency,  292 
Vocations  for  girls,  437 

Wagon,  school,  211 
Writing,  hand,  309 
Woman,  the  country,  425 

Y.  W.  C.  A.,  289,  441,  461 
Y.  M.  C.  A.,  289,  461 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW 


AN  INITIAL  FINE  OF  25  CENTS 

WILL  BE  ASSESSED  FOR  FAILURE  TO  RETURN 
THIS  BOOK  ON  THE  DATE  DUE.  THE  PENALTTY 
WILL  INCREASE  TO  50  CENTS  ON  THE  FOURTH 
DAY  AND  TO  $1.00  ON  THE  SEVENTH  DAY 
OVERDUE. 


APR    13  1935 

.lUL   29  1936 

AUG    3    1936 

^^^  ^    1839 

. 

LD  21-100m-8,'34 

YB  44An4 


/;    ()<) 


U 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


